Turned off of MMOs now

The way CoH is being shuttered (a very crappy way) is really turning me off from MMOs entirely. I mean, the kind of player I was, I was trying to get every character I had on Virtue to 50. I was gonna deck all of them out in purple and PvP IOs. I was gonna Incarnate all of them out. I was going to make a nice costume for every slot, and then buy more costume slots. I was going to fix some of my older level 50 characters that didn't really have the best names they could have. I was doing it all in a slow methodical way, because that was fun. And now I'm not gonna be able to do any of that. No amount of protesting from me will do any amount of good.

At least with Sim City 4, it's not only got a great online community, but even though EA hasn't supported the game for years, I can still actually play the darned thing to my heart's content! No need for an Internet connection either. If I want to socialize, well... that's why I play the game in windowed mode, and why I keep up my browser and my AIM. So there. lol

As far as social games go though, I'll probably stick with Magic the Gathering. If Hasbro ever decided to stop publishing the game, they're not going to send agents to my house to take back every card I've collected over the years.

At least you're not playing Magic Online. The day it becomes unprofitable, poof! All your cards vanish. Millions of high-pitched screams will ring out from basements across the world that day.

This is the only one I was playing anyway...

The early death of Tabula Rasa didn't stop me from continuing to play CoX, and the death of CoX isn't going to stop me from playing FFXI on-and-off until it dies.

I'm hesitant to return to pick up anything new in fear of becoming as attatched to it as I am with CoH.

The last game closure to hit me like this was PC server closure for Phantasy Star Universe. That was my first MMO, CoX being my second.

That blow was a soft one in comparison because they announced their closure plans months in advance and I hadn't played in almost 2 years. Even with those servers gone, it wasn't truly dead. You could start over on the Xbox servers or create a Japanese account and play the JP server.

They did end the game for good at the end of September this year but with good reason. They wanted to focus resources on Phantasy Star Online 2 instead of just shutting it down and sitting on the PS series without ever doing anything more with it.

It's hard finding a new MMO that has the same amount of attention that the devs paid to CoH. Every other MMO I've tried in the last week feels like the tiniest orphan. Bugs left for months, GM tickets left open perpetually, no new updates for the last 4 months or any planned in the future.


Even the simplest things, like re-adding chat bubbles to The Old Republic is met with a dev response along the lines of "I honestly have no idea if or when that will ever happen", and they're not lying.


Having Paragon Studios work on CoH and only CoH has spoiled me. I'm not used to the reality of every MMO being ran by skeleton crews as the good devs are bounced between new MMO to new MMO in a race to beat WoW.

Looking out at the MMO landscape is like looking at the Bermuda Triangle, littered with sinking and disabled ships as far as the eye can see. And I'm being force to pick which stranded ship is the best one for me.

I find myself sympathizing, for the most part. I haven't given up on Old Republic yet, just because I haven't seen all the storylines, and I've been enjoying those. But once I'm done with those, that's probably it for me. The sad thing is, no MMO gives the sorts of creation options that made this one so fun...so why bother? Granted, neither do any single player games that I'm aware of, but still, if what's the point of an MMO if I can't play 50 different, unique characters?

CoH's fairly deep and wide lore and its massive character customization allowed me to create characters that really felt like "mine" in ways I don't see any other game on the market or even the horizon doing. And I don't consider myself even close to being a roleplayer - while I always gave my characters a concept, I never created them based on concept. I played the game for its mechanics first, layered concept on afterwards, and I still got sucked in to a sense of attachement to my characters. I think that says something. And its one of the things that makes losing access to CoH suck quite so badly.

But something to keep in mind is that not all MMOs offer the same features that made many of us so attached to characters here.

Now, that in and of itself might make some of you disinterested in other MMOs, but don't forget that some MMOs might just actually be fun to play, at least for some folks. If you don't need that character attachment, and can play a game because it's entertaining, there might still be things out there you'll enjoy.

I don't think there's any reasonable way to avoid the risk of "losing" the result of time spent building up characters in persistent worlds outside of NWN-style architectures, but I think there is at least the hope of games where the end of the game is meaningful because you lose access to the fun of playing more than to the characters you invested in. That might be the kind of thing some people here could still get into.

I have a big long post elsewhere, the gist of which is that I've always been very ambivalent about many commonly accepted aspects of MMOs, and have enjoyed City of Heroes and a few others in large part because they do not follow that template. The continued dominance of the fantasy genre and focus on endgame and raiding is particularly discouraging.

So, yeah. I love this game, and a few others. I do not like, uncritically, as a category, "MMOs."

I'm feeling the same way. I was probably going to by Guild Wars 2 in the near future, but now I've completely written it off, both because it's online-only and the fact NCSoft owns it.

Other MMO's don't really tempt me much anymore either. I enjoyed The Secret World in beta, but even on special I can't bring myself to buy it. Nor can I even bring myself to download the trial for Rift despite my brother trying to get me to play it.

Even putting aside the uncertainties of an online-only, MMO-style of game... the problem is that most MMO's out are nothing more than EverQuest/WoW clones, and invariably bore me after a month or two. When I last tried out The Old Republic, I was bored after one weekend. Yes the stories had some potential, but ugh, the gameplay was so... bland and the character customization a joke. I was never super-impressed with Champions. I should look at DCU someday, but I've never been real big into DC's characters.

Maybe I'll play around with Star Trek Online again... it's improved a lot, but you level-up so stupidly fast now adays it takes some of the fun out of it.

/me sighs.

I've been through the death of Earth and Beyond, Auto Assault, Star Wars Galaxies and now City of Heroes. It truly sucks to see characters, relationships, adventures all gone in an instant. While this forum will be turned off at some point, I hope you all can find another place to continue to grow those relationships and enjoy new adventures together. There are a lot of great games out there that deserve to be played. Don't stop playing because of what happened to City of Heroes.