The CO Community & You

Hah! The suckers don't even realize we're mortal enemies.

Kidding.

I'm a lifetimer in CO, though I don't really play actively any more. I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something awkward about the controls that I never managed to get accustomed to.

I played CO in beta and just after it first came out...I just can't handle the art style. I know it's supposed to be 'comic-y' and 'stylistic' but it just looks....janky to me. It looks unfinished.

I'm sorry, CO; while I appreciate the offer, I cannot accept.

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Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

I've played Champions before, and it was pretty good. I have my gripes with it, and believe some of them may be fixed now, eg the newer Alert system covers the holes with PUG teaming and running out of missions to progress.
Its still probably twitchier than I like, with Blocking, and I really will miss inspirations, but its still a nice enough sandbox for realising super-characters.

The art style, fortunately, is at its worse when you're looking at your character's face, which is not most of the time. Dont turn around suddenly and you'll be OK

Its really nice to see the CO community extend this hand of friendship.

I'll definitely be giving them another go.

Any questions I had about CO were answered during a trial of it when it went F2P. The game is clunky, the UI is not friendly, the character creation is busy, the in game chat was filled with obscenity and it has little play-a-bility in comparison to COH. So our game may be older but, "IMO", it is worlds apart and better in every way. Each to their own.

Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of blocking.

In CoH, in a really tough fight, I could load up on inspirations, get some tmeporary powers and think my way around the situation a bit. If I couldnt win, it didn't matter.

In Champs, it came down to trying again after a tricky boss, hoping they'd drop a green bottle (a health insp basically) when they got to one of their 1/3 health bars, and hoping that I blocked better. And often the XP was gated behing the boss fight, since mission complete bonuses were way bigger than the xp for defeating minions along the way.
I discovered some consumables I could craft later on, for heals and shields, but they weren't as effective as 4 small purples and going to town.

That said, the game was still fun.

I like blocking in the context of "Oh **** the tank lost aggro, gonna block til he gets aggro back", if when waiting a few seconds to get endurance to shoot off a strong power, or if a mob is gonna shoot off a mez, blocking negates it. (Generally, sometimes it breaks through) Or on a team, about to face-plant, holding block giving the healer time to heal you. I've never really interpreted as being "weak", per-say, and there have been several times playing CoH wishing I could block (especially playing a Blaster.)

That said, I infinitely prefer the inspiration system CoH has, to orbs dropping in combat in Champions as that's inconsistent and unreliable. When fighting minions and LT's. Fighting bosses and CO's equivalent to elite bosses/arch-villians the orb drops tend to be more useful - dropping health and shield boosts. Fighting minions, you'll rarely get orb drops that you want.

While I'm not a big fan of blocking, I absolutely hate consumables.

Of course, I'm also not a big fan of loot/equipment-based superheroes, but given that I'm not in denial about enhancements I can't really count that as a point against ChO.

I was just looking at their official wiki, and it looks like the defensive abilities may still be rather weak. Weaker than an unslotted Tanker. Still, I'll probably give it a try again in the not-too-far-flung-future.

My absolute favorite thing about Coh was the pugs. Easy to get into, easy to manage, no guilt trip if you had to leave.

Aside from the Burst Alerts, which I've tried a few of, and they were quite fun for a bit, is there anything like the CoH teaming system in CO?

Last time I extensively played it was during launch, and I don't think I teamed more than once or twice, and when I did we sat around trying to line quests up more than we actually did anything..

No one even teamed for the instances that were around.. I had to slowly solo those for the quests (Thank god for the overpowered TK Shield back then LOL)

It's a good thing to see the Champions community is kind and welcoming. That wasn't the case last time I visited, back when it comprised mostly bitter, hateful ex City of Heroes players. I really appreciate the welcoming sentiment, and that alone may be reason enough to get me to give that game another try. Plus, they actually HAVE muscular women!

!!!

But at the same time, I really just don't like the game itself. I don't like the copper/silver/gold money system, I don't like the "bags" inventory, I don't like the loot (there OR here), I don't like the combat system and I REALLY don't like the art style. Plus, most of the missions are over-world and lack any real story. Maybe that's improved, I don't know, but being sent into a field to open crates and recover parts for someone is busywork. It's the exact same thing I complained about in City of Villains - it's meta-game work with very little story attached to it.

But what really turns me off is that the game simply doesn't take itself seriously. You can improve combat and loot and artwork, but you can't really change a game's fundamental design choices, and taking the piss out of comic books is one of those design choices. Me, I'm not a big fan of comic books and prefer a more general "sci-fi meets fantasy" setting, but even so the constant parody of comic books gets to me. In fact, the constant references to comic books grate a lot. It's why I never tried the DC MMO - I don't like Detective Comics.

All of that is not to sound ungrateful - I'll give the game a try at some point. But it is to say that my problems with the game shouldn't take anything away from its community. I appreciate the gesture, but the game just ain't my thing.

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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.

That's really nice to hear. I'm glad that another gaming community, especially one created to be a competitor to our own game, is in support of us.

I also don't care for Champions, but if things turn out badly, I hope that those who go to it enjoy it for many years to come.

For me, there's just only one superhero game I want to play, and that's City of Heroes. Champions has a potentially fascinating universe (I don't know much about the lore) but the approach felt a little too classic comic-book for me. As far as DC's game goes...well, aside from not liking the game-style, I have problems with their Universe these days in general. And Marvel's future game doesn't really interest me much - I liked City of Heroes because it was a part of it's own universe, and not a bigger companies. It was easier to create something that felt like your own.

Rant aside, like I said, it's nice to see support from other gaming communities.

I popped back in, on a free-to-play basis (money's really tight right now), and have been trying to get back up to speed with the game. I played through Beta and for six months after launch.

I liked many aspects of the game then, and I'm remembering those aspects now. I actually enjoy the combat system, particularly how it allows you to configure your screen to display a reticule and auto-target the (targetable) object closes to center-of-screen (under the reticule). Somewhat like an FPS targeting system, which I've always preferred over tab targeting.

I also like the free-form character progression, and when I can afford the paid sub, I'm looking forward to playing my freeform characters again. A couple of those were re-creations of CoX characters, so as a roleplayer, I'll enjoy working up their reason for being in a different world and so forth. All dependent on what ends up happening to my beloved Paragon City, of course!

One of my big objections previously was the overly campy feel of the game world. It was so over-the-top that it often seemed like I was playing The Tick Online. Bit of an immersion killer for someone like me, who's not really much of a comic book fan and who approached the CoX world from a somewhat different basic angle. Fortunately, much of the content in CO that's been developed since I left seems to have toned that down quite a bit.

I don't find CO's engine to produce the wonderfully fluid movement and sense of mass and "real" physics that CoX's does. "City" is still the best MMO I've ever played for that, the best for "kinetic immersion." CO's better than the MMO average for that...just not as good as CoX.

The welcome from the community over there has indeed been very warm. I had a character configuration issue, posted to their forum, and had several attempts to help follow on in pretty short order. There are several "welcome" threads, too.

That was a mighty nice sentiment, but its to soon for me to ponder that course of action.
Like making "F Me eyes" at your sister-in-law across your wife's death bed.

Ugh. Trying to link my account to login to the forums over there is proving to be quite a headache. And since I can't access my email from work, it appears I won't easily be able to login from the place where it's most important to me. And I swear I played Jade Dynasty, but neither of my e-mails is linked to a Perfect World account.

Quick update on this. There was originally a chat group created called "COH Refugees" for older CO veterans to help new COH people get a handle with the differences in the two games and have fun. It has been merged into "COX". So if you do go over and try out the game, join the chat channel "COX" (no invite needed just add it with the chat client) and there's a LOT of COH players.

While the game it self doesn't have a lot of teaming and doesn't even reward teaming as well as City simply because it needs the holy trinity to function whereas we can do anything with almost any team, that particular channel is very active and people are grouping up all the time, forming new SGs helping people into established SGs etc.

I only jumped into CO for a few hours yesterday but found the community very welcoming. The game isn't the same. Their devs are not nearly as communicative as ours and they do have a LOT of bugs. But their community is really stepping up and they deserve recognition for that. If you want a new home should all the efforts to save City fail, at a minimum there is one place where you will feel instantly welcomed. And in the end, community counts for a hell of a lot.

I appreciate the welcome.

Some of things I loved in CO.

1)Costume creator-Not as good as COH's, but still good.

2)Nemesis system- To create your own arch-enemy and he/she randomly appears in a mission..Genious.

3)Open Framework archtype. I can be a combo of MM, Scrapper and healer all in one..Loved it.

I like to think as CO as a single player game, since teaming is, well, just not there.

Whether I will take up residence? Probably not, but I may visit time to time. Maybe just to keep some of my toons alive in some sense.