The CO Community & You

That's reasonable.

I enjoyed the heck out of CO but every time I tried to play it I came back to CoH instead.

Thanks for your kind words.

I am not expecting a miracle either. But it can't hurt to try every option available.

We City of Heroes players very much thank you all for the warm welcome we've received here on your forums and on the servers. (With a few NOTABLE Exceptions to the rule - See above) (This was not in reference to to the poster I was responding to BTW, but the troll who had preceded him by a few posts.)

But I hope you'll understand and not take offense when I say we want to delay that welcome as long as possible. You have a good game here. But we are still fighting to save ours.

And we could use all the help we can get.

To that end, I'd like to ask Champions players to help out as well.

Sign the petitions and send the heads of NCSoft emails and actual physical snail mail letters if you can!

Explain to them that even though you play a completely different game, that you think that shutting City of Heroes down is a grave mistake. Be polite. Don't harangue them.

But tell them things like "I don't play City of Heroes, I play Champions, but having City of Heroes up and running is better for the gaming industry and MMOs as a whole because it increases the diversity of games. Even within the same genre. Champions and CoH have competed in the niche of superhero MMOs, but far from being a detriment, the competition has enriched both games. It would be a shame to lose City of Heroes."

Explain to them that their sudden closure of City of Heroes does not give you the confidence that you need in order to invest your time and money into products like Guild Wars 2. Because you cannot be sure they will not do the exact same thing to that game.

For further guidelines for writing such letters and emails, check this post at Titan Network.
http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php?topic=4886.0


Once you've composed your letter, send two copies to the following addresses:

Mr. Taek Jin Kim, Chief Executive Officer
NCsoft Corporation
1501 4th Avenue, Suite 2050
Seattle, WA 98101
UNITED STATES

In Korea:

Mr. Taek Jin Kim, Chief Executive Officer
NCsoft Corporation
157-37 Samsung-dong
Kangnamu-gu, Seoul 135-090
KOREA

(if you can afford registered mail, so much the better.)


You might ask yourselves - why should we fight to help save City of Heroes?

The simplest answer is "enlightened self-interest".

Change the way that companies like NCSoft and PWE view their customer base and you may just make Champions Online's future that much more secure as well.

Think about that. Imagine if Mr. Taek Jin Kim got letters and emails not just from City of Heroes players, but from players of CHAMPIONS as well? Or perhaps from players of DCUO? Or even some from Star Trek Online?

Think how amazingly HUGE that would be! What an impact it would have!

Think of the positive media attention that you would receive for such efforts!

In City of Heroes and Champions both - we are inspired by heroes.

Be a Hero.

Same here. Especially on the forums, people seem generally nice and helpful. Even when I'm being stubborn on asking for help on a build, which has historically caused people in our own AT forums to tell me I just don't want to listen more often than not. Sure, I had that one troll who picked the whole "Why are you playing an MMO if you don't want to team?" angle after I complained a whole story arc I did solo ended in a mandatory queuing team mission, but mostly, people are friendly.

In the past, I've complained about it, but something struck me in a conversation yesterday. "If I run out of energy... I'll just use my energy builder attack!" I proclaimed without realising how much better this is than what we have here, which is "Do nothing or run away or die because my toggles dropped." Plus, while I love City of Heroes and all its powers and animations, a lot of ours are redundant. Honestly, think about it: How are Flares and Fire Blast different, conceptually speaking? This causes me to have to double- and triple-up on different versions of the same attack, and then often throw in attacks that aren't appropriate for the situation just to fill in the gap so I'm not standing still waiting.

In Champions, you have a constant no-cost energy-building "auto-attack," and then all the "costly" attacks have no recharge whatsoever. What this means is I can pick one melee attack, one close-range AoE, one long-range AoE and call it a day. What I'm saying is you never have to double-up on similar-acting attacks, and if you have an attack that's appropriate to the situation, you're never forced to stop using it, but for reasons of energy. And from what I've seen, it doesn't take long to build energy at all. Your energy builder tends to fill your whole bar in two, maybe three seconds. I'm sure there's some min/maxing optimisation in there somewhere, but if all running out of energy means is my DPS drops, then I can live with it.

Honestly, for as different as the combat system is, I... Don't hate it. Not nearly as much as I used to.

To try and be positive, Champions does a lot of things right in costume design. There is a LOT of variety in body modification, allowing people to make characters with shockingly diverse silhouettes. Last night, I ran into a woman with "arms like pipes" in the Power House, which fit her general design. The day before, I went across a 1-foot-tall chubby creature that looked like Craig MacCracken's Dexter in yellow spandex. Soon before I logged off, I ran into an almost stick-figure thin, tall spindly alien which looked like a grashopper learned how to walk on two legs. Say what you will, but most everyone in City of Heroes has more or less the same body type as his general player model, which is especially punishing to women who can't grow past "photo shoot model." Say what you will about costume selection and art style, but Champions does more to customize your physical build than any game I've ever seen, including The Klub 17 mod for 3D Sex Villa.

All of that said, I do dislike the art style. GREATLY. Pointing to "the face" is a good call. There's really only one face, and for as much as the body can be customized, it's outright criminal that the face can't be. Games like Aion have and Saints Row have demonstrated that the "one face with sliders" system can work quite well and produce drastically unique faces, and I really don't get why Champions' face sliders are so reserved. Or why they're so weird. Both body and face sliders work "at an angle," meaning they change stuff they really shouldn't while not affecting the thing they should be enough, so while the customization is there, it's often in the wrong places and kind of confusing. To be honest, characters with non-human faces look the best because they aren't so obviously "uncanny valley," but human faces are just ugly. And I don't mean the graphics are bad, they're just the faces of ugly people.

When it comes to art style and art design, by far the BEST, most impressive visual designs you'll see will be in the Power House, as done by the players themselves. The game's NPCs are almost criminally ugly and have really bizarre physiques. Defender has short stubby legs, arms that reach down to his knees, hands as big as his head and a hunched-over posture. I mean no offence to Jack Emmert, but Defender looks like he walked out of BoneTown... Why do I keep quoting games like this? Anyway, "the game" is cartoony, caricature and actually quite ugly, but YOU don't have to be. There's more than enough customization in there to prevent at least your character from looking like Lord Bravery.

The UI is weird. It stacks missions in a row under your map, but they overlap with "alert" missions so you can't read anything past mission four in your queue. And considering Champions has a WoW-style missions system where you gather a dozen hunts and go do them all, that's a problem. It took me two full days to realise I can rearrange the UI, because it's not done like you'd think it's done. You can't drag windows around, you have to enter "UI rearrange mode," which turns windows into transparent squares. And some windows extend past their "squares" too. I don't know why this was done. It's more trouble than it should be. And with no ability to save UI settings or chat settings or keybinds that I could find, I foresee a lot of trouble when making new characters.

When I complained about this to people, they told me most of the newer content took itself a little more seriously. I'm not seeing it. The game's "story" is one big joke, and it seems to have been created by someone who HATES comic books and wants to show how ridiculous they are. A mission had me save comic book artists from Foxbat, who wanted them to draw a comic for him. My contact's "mission complete" text said something to the effect of "Thank you! Now fat, filthy, ugly, stupid, anti-social comic nerds won't have to wait an extra minute for their ****** comic book to be printed!" I'm paraphrasing a little (the game said "hygiene-challenge" instead of "filthy," for instance), but... Game? Are you aware who your target audience is?

Honestly, for as much as I've complained about the "comic-bookiness" here, City of Heroes still feels like it was written by people who ostensibly liked comic books, took them as legitimate art and wanted to tell good stories in a similar style. Champions seems to have been written by people who hate and revile comic books and are doing everything the can to mock and satirise not just the genre, but the people who enjoy it. Generic "Prisoners have escaped! Go defeat 15 of them!" are boring, but I can take them. It's standard MMO fare. Missions that make fun of me for playing them, however, just don't belong in a game.

Champions Online isn't the right game to play for the story, simply put. It's cheesy, over-the-top and intentionally bad. The game doesn't take itself seriously and nothing really feels like it has a major impact. There's no better example than the tutorial - Aliens have invaded and are poised to destroy our world, but no-one seems that concerned about it. I spend my time saving people's cats, saving Foxbat from under debris and basically doing "hunt 15" missions. And when it's done? It's like it never happened. Everything's cleaned up and there's no sign of the invasion. In Paragon City, the alien invasion informed THE ENTIRE STORY of the game for years to come, but in Millenium City? Meh, it's no big deal. Or look at the destruction of Galaxy City - a zone was devastated, and now we have to deal with refugees, rampant crime, loss of infrastructure and so forth. It's a big deal.

The truth of the matter is that nothing in Champions Online feels like a big deal, because "status quo is kind." Whatever happens, we find out about it, stop it and everything goes back to how it was. Nothing has consequences, not even make-pretend consequences in-storyline. I guess my problem is that no-one ACTS like there's anything at stake. Sure, Kodiak goes out of his way to explain why a psi-bomb exploding in the West Side is bad... As though that wasn't obvious, but he never acts like he's CONCERNED. For instance, if I were to open my workplace window and jump out of it right now, I'd probably break both of my legs, and possibly my neck, but do you see me worry that might happen? Of course not, because I know I wouldn't do that. And when people act like they care, like Kevin Poe's speech before detonating the bomb, the voice actors and writing end up making it feel like "scaring the little girl" scenery-chewing overacting.

I wouldn't try to take the story seriously if it can't take itself seriously, yet I can't laugh at it because the "humour" is just... Bad.

There is less in terms of volume, decidedly, but a lot of what's there is actually a mashup of MANY concepts. For instance, "martial arts" as a general set includes single blade, dual blades, unarmed and... I forget what else. Each of those sub-sets has two or three attacks that are weapon-specific, but the rest of the powers are pretty much generic to the general concept of the set. You have, for instance, "Lightning Reflexes," which is basically the entirety of Super Reflexes all rolled into one, and it's just a Martial Arts passive. You have a few power combos that take advantage off each other, such as single-blade attacks causing "bleed" and certain toggles spawning effects on every bleed, but you can take most any martial-arts-relevant content and put it together from among these.

Moreover, because you can mix-and-match powers between pretty much any set, this opens up a LOT of opportunities that City of Heroes simply never had, and likely never would have. The two that finally convinced me to give the game a try were Sam Tow himself, who should be using an energy blade and pistols, and just didn't have pistols here. The other is the Steel Rook, who was always intended to be a Power Armour Gatling Gun Guy. They builds don't always come out like what you'd think they would - Sam's using Power Armour Laser Swords, Munitions Pistols and Martial Arts defences - but a lot of what might seem like it can't work really can.

So while Champions might have less specific freedom, there's a lot of opportunity to mix-and-match which... Really is worth a lot.

Same here. City of Heroes became nearly unmanageable for me with Ultra Mode until I bought a GeForce GTX580, and even then I can't really step on the graphics or City of Villains zones will lag for me, and lag bad. Cap Au Diable is still horrid. Champions lags, I agree, and it does drop me into the 40s of framerate more often, but it just seems to be a tad better optimised. It's just that the game's baseline graphics are higher than City of Heroes. CoH CAN work better, but that's if you disable real-time reflections, ambient occlusion, real-time shadows and so forth. Champions is a resource hog, but I wouldn't say it's considerably more so. It's just a resource hog that can't go down as much as City of Heroes can without the game looking like ***.

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.

You can actually change this, I believe. There ought to be a "neutral" and a "heroic" stance as alternatives to the horrid, grating "vixen" stance.

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.

Actually, the story does get pretty dark and takes itself pretty seriously at times. The adventure packs, specifically Demonflame, has a great story about ancient gods in the Qliphothic. The Comic Series "Aftermath" follows after Demonflame, and shows you what happens when casualties of transdimentional battles get left behind in a dimension that is full of twisted and dark creatures (think of the Shadow Shard). The Comic Series "Whiteout" has a very dark story that has you stranded in the middle of a Canadian blizzard with shape-shifting aliens and has great atmosphere that reminds me of John Carpenters The Thing. (Seriously, if you ever play Whiteout, make sure the volume is turned up. It has great effects)

And Vibora Bay's entire crisis zone has you saving the Champions, going back in time and trying to prevent a... "certain events."

But that's not to say there isn't plenty of camp in Champs, there really is. I liken it to the 1960's Batman show on T.V. That then goes off into darker avenues that takes a more serious tone. It definitely isn't as serious and dark consistently as CoH is, but when the story gets serious, it's comparable.

You're right. I was mostly going off recollection. I don't recall there being shuriken throw when I last tried the set, and so it was a pure melee (as opposed to melee/ranged) set. Serious derp action there. Should have checked the wiki first o_O.

Actually for energy based melee what you want is "Telekinesis".

Which is really mis-named. It really should be called "Psi-blades" or "Psi-Swords" (depending on the special effect/blade you choose in the costume creator for it.

And when done right it is an absolute WHIRLING DERVISH of death! I should know - one of my "mains" over in CO is this type. In Melee she's a freaking Cuisinart! Your main attacks are single/dual psi-blades that attack so fast they can literally be a blur, and there's a maintained attack which is nothing but a sustained whirling kata of blades that will do a PBAOE Cone of destruction on any set of enemies directly in front of you.

The AT for this is called "The Disciple" if you want the simple version. In free form some of the powers you have access to are not psi-blades. But actual telekinetic attacks. There's even one that lets you remote choke an opponent! (I find your lake of faith... disturbing.)

Also, in free-form mode, some of the force and elemental blasting sets (like ice, Flame, etc) have some point blank attacks which, like energy melee, are good at keeping grabby mobs off of you.

There's Telekinesis. And Power Armor has an array of energy melee attacks, though it lacks a melee energy builder.

Indeed. Support and Control could use some major improvement.

Technically, shurikens aren't part of Claws specifically. They're a "shared" power that gets unlocked by any Martial Arts power from any of the subsets. That's quite ingenious, actually. It's like if, say, I could unlock Golden Dragonfly if I took enough powers from Martial Arts and Street Justice. It removes the need to have, say, a zillion versions of Build Up like we have here, since powers can be shared between sets.

In fact, from what I've seen, there are about as many shared powers in Martial Arts as there are specific ones.

You have to consider one other thing - City of Heroes has "trained" us what to expect, but what it has trained us to expect isn't always a good idea. Like you, I too started out wanting energy melee powersets... But then I remembered WHY I started using Energy Melee to begin with - because I wanted an energy-using character who wasn't squishy. That's why my Princess Inna is Energy/Will, a reroll from an Energy/Energy Blaster. Champions' considerably different system is kind of helping me think outside the box, and the more I think about it... The more I realise that elemental and energy melee sets don't make sense TO ME. Hear me out.

For years, I complained how "punching with darkness" is goofy when you stop to think about it, yet I kept doing it because... What else was I gonna' do? But if I had options? Well, Inna wouldn't be punching with energy, because that's not how I envisioned her back in 2007 when I first made her. She'd be shooting energy and be very hard to kill. When you start being able to mix ranged sets with defences, the "glowing fists" powersets start to lose their appeal, at least to me. And I can always pick punching attacks from other sets to make do. The fists won't glow, but they'll still be punching attacks.

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.

I played CO at the start - from beta for about 4 months solidly after launch; I remember the content being pretty poor (and sparse) compared to CoH; I hated that you didn't start in the city (they've changed it so you do) and I hated some of the later zones - Monster Island? Hated it. Underwater-zone? Hated it.

I was really struggling liking the game's stories until they added Vibora Bay - that one zone pretty much saved the game for me; the story and the way it's told was unlike anything else in the game: stuff happens, people are affected - at least for a while.

I haven't played much since. I really didn't relish playing through the content again with a new character; despite being an altoholic here and despite owning an LTS to that game, I've always preferred coming here for my superhero kicks. I know they've added a fair bit of content to CO the last couple of years, but I haven't managed to stay in-game long enough to try it - I tend to log in then log out 10 minutes later and boot CoH.

Once dropping in here is no longer an option, I'll give CO more of an effort - I just hope the new stuff more like Vibora Bay than the rest of the game.

I think you have to remember that CO grew out of the devs' experiences with CoH through Issue 6 when (de)buff stacking and controls could turn any encounter, save Hami, into a snooze.

Even today, CoH's devs have been dealing with the same issues -- just look at how the Incarnate Trials have been structured with mobs that are, more or less, immune to controls along with the insta-gibs, jacked up ToHit values, and confuses. One of my pet peeves is that the structure of CoH's epic content is designed explicitly to negate Force Fields.

The CO devs made a trade-off -- having weaker / non-stacking (de)buffs (and controls) that always do something compared to CoH's situation where you have insanely good or completely ineffective (de)buffs and controls.

It's not on the wiki, but power armor has three energy builders:

Wrist Bolter, Power Bolts, and Laser Edge. The third one is melee.

Hey, now. Punching with darkness is pretty darned awesome.

Think of it as something like punching someone right in the soul.

Do you mean as a visual effect? Because that would be awesome, and would keenly solve any and all desire I have for energy punches. Let me be more specific: Can I pick something from Fire that will make, say, my Might punches have a fire effect on them?

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.

From what I recall your options in that area are more powers that'd give your character e.g. a full-body fiery aura, rather than add a fire effect to your other power activations. Most of them are either slotted passives, or 'click' buildup type powers. I think there's a fieryish aura in the supernatural pool that is a toggle rather than passive or click (it doesn't do much besides look pretty though).

There are/were also items that when equipped produced a proc effect of e.g. chance for fire damage, and in the case of weapons they gave a visible costume change when equipped (e.g. a flaming sword). I'm not sure what the current status of those are (whether they survived the crafting revamp), and I think the ones with the flashy elemental effects only produced the visual so long as you had the item equipped, which wasn't practical if you were still levelling or just didn't like the stats on it.

This is a bummer, no doubt, but no game comes close to COH in this regard.
EDIT: I read your statement to mean elemental-based melee attacks. As others have pointed out above, there are a few energy based melee attacks.


I agree. Its unfortunate. COH had the best control powers of any game I ever played.
No other game comes close, and there's probably a good reason for it. I've been playing TSW too and it has the same problem as CO.

I agree again. This, too, is unfortunate. Like control powers, COH had the best support powers of any game I ever played. Very few people seem to like being a heal bot (or even a tank!) anyway, no matter what the game, and yet game companies continue designing holy trinity game play. GW2 seems to have solved this problem, from what I hear, but I cannot verify.

This I disagree with. While there are powers that you could classify as falling in one of the Trinity categories, CO is still a very solo friendly game. Some archetypes are more friendly than others, like the behemoth, but I'm doing fine with my Power Armor (I'm FreeForm, BTW) toon spec'd for range damage. You have to be a little more strategic in CO, regardless of AT. For one, everyone gets "block" and this goes a long way towards keeping you alive. Also, you have to pay attention to the "tells" some enemies give you and move out of their way before they attack.

Once you get the hang of how the powers work, taking out a typical trash mob is pretty much clockwork. Where it can get a little tricky is with Master Villains (Ellite Boss) and Super Villains (Arch Villain), but that was even the case with COH. At Normal difficulty, my ranged damage toon had little trouble with Master Villains, but I needed help when I faced my first Super Villain, Kevin Poe.

As far as teaming up goes, I'm not sure how much the Trinity matters. I'm guessing it matters depending on the context. I duo'd missions last night at normal difficulty level and both of us were range damage toons. It might matter more if you scale up the mission difficulty level or when fighting the BIG DUMB MONSTER. I know CO has aggro mechanics, with each role generating aggro at slightly different levels, but I'm not sure how this works out in practice.

When you go into Options, and the HUD tab, you'll see a "Save UI" button at the bottom. It saves your UI, chat windows, and (so far as I have been able to tell) most if not all of your other settings in options.

I'm glad they finally added that. I remember creating characters and then abandoning them in the tutorial because I didn't want to go through the rigor of setting up my controls, prefs, and UI yet again!

Games are like any other business- as long as revenue outstrips expenses, you'll do fine.

CoH *should* have been fine for the foreseeable future but was betrayed by corporate BS. I wouldn't worry about the size of the CO community because their publisher seems to understand what they have- a niche game that is part of an overall F2P strategy, not a WoW killer.


On the topic of CO as a game, it isn't fair to say it "sucks".
There are many things I dislike about it, but it has already outlived DCUO on my hard drive by ten hours. It's a different creature than CoH, and so I expect discontents as I much preferred CoH.

But it doesn't suck.