Where to now?

COH is my first/only MMO I have ever played and after almost 7 years I have to admit finding something else, if the efforts to save COH fails, for me is pretty bleak.

With that in mind I am giving Champions Online a try. The graphics are a bit jarring when I first log in but after a while I get used to it. What has helped greatly are the player made templates that a few good people over there have developed that mirror as close as possible the body characteristics of our basic models here in our character creator.

Once you get ride of the freakishly out of proportion body measurements it's a lot easier to take on. I subbed monthly then cancelled the next day. I just wanted everything open to me with no restrictions while I test things out. My first time on my feeling was I was all alone. For me just chatting and more specifically teaming has been a large learning curve. I am going to give the "COX" channel RiverOcean mentioned a shot.

As a side note... some of the people I have been able to chat with in CO as of today have no idea that COH was being shutdown so I have been giving out the links for the save COH website and other information links. Although they do not play COH or were players years ago, all have expressed their sympathy and are appalled by NCSofts actions. I have found that the small amount of player-base I have interacted with to be mostly very generous about answering questions and have been very patient with me since I am newbie to their gaming universe.

I used to play CO back when it first came out, and may end up going back there. I liked the free-form builds you could do, the END-builder attacks, the perfect aim, and the blocking. The graphics were something I could never get used to, and the jokey attitude throughout the game was off-putting.

When CO came out, they stressed how different they were from CoX. I recently read all about the CO updates over the years, and it appears they've spent considerable amount of time and effort aping CoX (archetypes, mirror universe, etc.). Still, not a bad game.

I really enjoy Star Trek Online, although I've gottena little burned out on the Starbase building grind lately. STO is a fun game, even if you're not a Star Trek fan. Plus, the space battles are awesome!

I've been playing a lot of Batman:Arkham City lately. Sure, its a single-player game, but boy is it fun! Lots of good superhero action here.

I've never tried DCUO, but will give it a shot next.

I'm going to miss CoX. I spent a shocking % of my lifetime playing this game, and having great fun doing it.

I'm probably not picking up another MMO. I may make the occasional appearance in STO, as I kinda-sorta like playing over there every once in a while, but that's a rare event. Depending on how the beta pans out, and what they add, I know I'll spend some time in Mechwarrior - but that's more a shooter than an MMO, honestly (though a shooter with big freaking mechs) and it's not in small part to my old Netmech/DOS clan being over there.

I've played a good selection of other MMOs... I think the longest I've lasted in any, though, were about six months in Aion (and that was... yeah... no. I'm not into a grindfest.) I think three? in TOR. Six, perhaps, since launch in STO. I know I have something in LOTOR, havent' fired that up in a long time. Not interested in finishing up anyone in GW, not interested in GW2 at all....

Yeah, I think where I'm going is "into the sunset."

See my Guides and Tutorials

I still might flirt with various old F2P and no-commitment MMOs that can run on my crummy computer. High time I reinstall Anarchy Online. I've been neglecting my DDO, Dofus and Ragnarok Online accounts, too.

But for now, I seem to have landed in Minecraft. Didn't see that coming.

Go play Champions Online regardless of everyone else's experience here.

...

I miss the Mastermind Archetype...

So, after being away from CoX for a few weeks and playing a variety of other MMOs, here are some observations and opinions on some games out there, most of which I bashed just a few weeks ago.

Champions: has a lot of good things going for it, especially customization. The UI is not intuitive however, and if you created a character a while back, it might be best to start over just to get the tutorial for the new features. A lot of the CoX RPers have wound up here and this influx of people seem to have altered the "feel" of the city over the last few weeks. If you're going to go there though, you'll need to read the forums to figure out what's going on with the UI and the level progression. If something seems confusing, just ask the general population and it's a fair bet that it'll get resolved quickly. I just bought a jet there and enjoy using my vehicle to get to missions.

DCUO: Is much more streamlined and the missions are much better put together, with great graphics and voice acting but at the cost of customization. There really aren't a lot of costume options here in the beginning. You pick up gear as you go along that gets put into your "style" slots and you can change what you look like, regardless of your gear, on the fly. The game is an action RPG and the missions are very well put together. I use my xbox controller and enjoy playing along with some of my childhood heroes.

Tera: No one else has thrown this out there yet so I thought I would. This game also uses an xbox controller and relies on an blocking, dodging mechanics. Missions aren't so fleshed out, but it's new and they're adding things. I really like the look of the game and the attacks, defenses are a lot of fun.

Also playing Batman Arkum City (amazing) and the metal gear solid HD pack which will take me weeks to finish

I too was terribly disappointed to hear that the Marvel MMO was a diablo styled game. I simply have no desire to play something like that.

Hope to see ya'll around, and good luck out there.

After having attended the Tabula Rasa War College in 2008 ... where I got to meet CuppaJo and Critters (former community managers of CoH), as well as Richard Garriott and Starr Long and many of the Tabula Rasa developers, there's one thing they said about launching a game that sticks with me after all these years, and it's this.

It is standard operating procedure for games to shed staff/developers after launching.

Although it seems counter-intuitive to us, as players, this is apparently "normal business practice" in the gaming industry ... that once a game launches, layoffs will occur ... pretty much regardless of how well the game does in the marketplace. Those of us who weren't gamers wondered openly why that should be so, and the answer came back that a lot of the people needed to get a game READY for launch aren't necessarily "needed" once the game HAS LAUNCHED. How much of a layoff/cutback occurs after launching kinda sorta depends on the mix of developers who were on payroll before the game reached launch day (which makes sense), but chopping a Dev team in half is not unheard of ... or particularly uncommon.

Heck, within A YEAR ... Cryptic Studios was down to the Fighting 15 Devs (including Positron, Manticore, Back Alley Brawler, Castle and lots of other Rednames we oldtimers would recognize) who kept CoH on life support long enough for NCSoft to scoop it up (only to turn around and knife it in the back in the middle of the night 5 years later, but that's another story).

So if you're looking at news items saying that Tera has cut a substantial portion of its developer staff after launch, and that's giving you the jitters about a new (or at least, new in the NA/EU market) game, realize that layoffs in a studio after launch are pretty much standard practice as a studio realigns from doing "Pure" Creation and QA prior to launch over to doing Maintenance and Expansion post-launch ... the latter pretty much "requiring" a different mix of skills and personnel from what was needed pre-launch.



Server consolidation ... is never a "great thing" to have to do, but it's a "if you gotta do it, might as well get it over with" kind of thing. And yeah, the article you cite is spinning it as best can ... but the simple fact of the matter is that if you're going to do a server consolidation, doing it within the first 6 months after launch is probably the best time to do it (if you're going to do it).

And consider the CoH experience as a backdrop here. Freedumb and Virtue were highly populated servers ... and everything else was pretty much Crickets-ville (by comparison). Some people liked playing on low population servers (fewer hassles from other players), but it also make team and league content that much harder to gather people up for. Heck, even on Virtue it's a challenge to get enough people together for a Cathedral of Pain run ... and you only need 21 people outside your SG and 3 people in your SG to lead the teams to do that ... and recruiting for the event could STILL take 3-5x as long as the event itself. I can hardly imagine what recruiting for League Content must be like on lower population CoH servers.

Basically Tera launched with an overcapacity of servers, because in many ways it's far better to have "too much" server capacity than "not enough" as far as these things go. That overcapacity "balkanized" the playerbase below a critical threshold needed to get communities going "properly" and an in-game economy kickstarted. So the only thing you can really do is realign the populations ... and if you're going to do that at all you might as well defrag your playerbase to the maximum extent possible, which is what it looks like they did.

The "nice" thing about the server move Tera did is that if you're new to the game AFTER the merge, you're going to be starting out in some pretty populated servers with plenty of players on them. Adding new servers after this point, to grow with an expanding player base (should it expand), would be a relatively simple operation, and the number of established players "overflowing" into the new server to create alts would ensure that there's a healthy enough population to get a new server populated and operational from a player perspective.

Yeah, it sucks they had to merge servers ... but that's already over and done, so anyone new to the game after the merge doesn't have to "go through that" and can simply start fresh among well populated servers (as opposed to mostly empty servers because there's too many of them). It's a "bite the bullet NOW so you can heal better for later" kind of thing, as far as I'm concerned.

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

Yeah, I got all the way to level 12 in Diablo 3 before I gave up.

The voice acting was great, especially the little chats I had with the lovely Christopher Eccleston-ish Templar, but it totally failed to grab me, despite my utter love for Diablo II.

Thanks, Redlynne -- those explanations all make sense, and helped to temper my initial "OMG dooooooom!" reaction to the somewhat scary points I brought up, but your comments do put things in a better (and more positive) perspective!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Redlynne Incidentally, what's the server population and community like when you're playing Tera, after the mergers? For a lot of people, the "feel" of a CoH server is rooted in its community, so would you say any of the Tera servers come close to the Redside/Blueside casual camraderie we have in CoH?

I'm kind of curious about the "feel" of the community myself -- but from the one article I found, I'm betting that the feel of each server will be vastly different:

"When the dust settles on September 18, only 1 PvE, 1 PvP, and 1 roleplaying server will remain." http://www.shacknews.com/article/755...ervers-into-3#

I may have to check out TERA after all!

I always try to pick the servers with the higher populations. When I firsted started to play CoX, my first real MMO, I felt differently and chose Guardian, so I could experience it with a lower population. After getting to 50 there, I realized that I needed a bigger community to keep playing, so I switched to Virtue and joined a new SG.

I think the real key to any new game is finding a guild or SG within the first week or so. You won't be able to replace the community you had here, there simply isn't another MMO that has such a robust and helpful group of people around, but being in a guild or SG really helps. There are a couple on CO and DCUO that cater to CoX refugees if you're looking.

As far as Tera goes, I think they have a good community now, probably because everyone still has to pay and because it's such a unique gameplay experience.

Talked to the friend of mine who picked up a trial account to test drive Tera again this morning, and they've apparently gotten to Level 15-16 with an Elin Archer. I asked about the "community feel" and the response I got back was that the RP server, Celestial Hills, feels a *LOT* like Cassiopeia in Tabula Rasa. With a trial account, you can't participate in chats and channels, but you can observe them.

Apparently someone said something to the effect of "friend says CH is gay" on what amounts to broadcast, and the general consensus of response was basically along the lines of "that's not a friend you have there" along with the somewhat to be expected "we're not a bunch of elitist min-max jerks over here, you know" and the like. There were people talking about how they were hanging around in the lower level towns and zone, just helping out newbies and the like getting started and so on. Everything's just very laid back and casual on the Celestial Hills (RP) server it seems, which means probably the closest corollary to CoH servers would be (surprise, surprise) the Virtue community. You might not have the equivalent of costume contests under Atlas Statue like you've got happening nearly all the time on Virtue ... but the *spirit* of that kind of community feeling and camraderie seems to be present on the Celestial Hills server at least.

Which means I've basically run out of reasons *NOT* to start playing Tera and seeing how it goes, myself.

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

1. I will probably try CO just to get my superhero fix. I'll probably even pay the money for a subscription just to be able to try everything out before I make my final decision on this game, but I'll probably try it out.

2. I have multiple EVE accounts. I have reservations about going back to this game though. There were days of playing it that I logged out with the same satisfaction I get when I pull a 12 hour shift at work in my RL job. Honestly, the only thing that would really get me hardcore back into EVE would be if a big enough group of CoH refugees banded together to do something big. Honestly, this would be a thrill and I would totally be willing to head it up if it hasn't happened already, but I just don't think there would be a big enough interest from this community. Again I would be thrilled to be proven wrong here. My EVE character's name is Horrorshow Ellie. Send me an email in EVE and I'll probably get it sometime this week, or message me in CoH.

3. I am really drawn to The Secret World. Like CO, I will probably give this game AT LEAST a short run, and when I do I'll try to find other CoH refugees, and we'll see what happens. Among other things, this game is fairly new and a large community here will be starting that game from its near beginning which in a weird way is a perk for me.

4. Last and probably least, I have a Diablo 3 account. Like I've read before in this thread, I really wanted to like this game, but I honestly don't. I played Diablo 2 at launch and stuck with it for about 3 years, but D3 was the biggest let down I have ever experienced. Every bad thing you read about it, yeah it's true.

Also, if this game lives on, I might never play another video game ever again.