Where CoH went wrong

We've been accused of thinking the game is perfect and hate people who say otherwise. So OK, this is the place for your gripes about what happened with the game.

Three rules. (OK, suggestions)

(1) Be specific. Not "they lied", not "they love eviscerating characters", but specific things you think was wrong.

(2) Focus on the act, not the people. No badmouthing the character of either CoH employees for implementing or other players who might support it.

(3) If you want to challenge someone on why you think this was good for the game, do it, but again, keep it specific and keep it on the acts and the impact on the game.

Note: It's up to you if you think your complaints are "where CoH went wrong and why it's being shut down" or "where CoH went wrong but I love so much more".

The post Alpha/shard Incarnate system. Pretty much turned the game dynamics on its head. Raiding, grinding, not friendly to alts and bled into the non-Incarnate game whether the rest of the team liked or not. Nothing says homogenization like rolling destinies and judgements.

Then there was the orders-of-magnitude speed difference between the raid speed and the DA speed. One weekend of raids could take months to accomplish in DA.

Here's my immediate list.

(1) The handling of ED was abysmal. After being told that the changes to the powers was over, suddenly ED made powers far less able to be enhanced. I think that in the game today, with IOs in place, ED may have made the game better. But it came as a surprise after we thought it was done and the delay between ED and IOs was too long.

(2) Old content not being updated. Over the years, the story-telling abilities have improved, both in techniques and the idea of what was fun. The old content is way too long, way too repetitive (why clear out one council base when you can clear out six?). The Positron TF was an incredibly unfun grindy TF that got broken into two fun shorter TFs. In the transition from Sister Psyche to Penny Yin, the TF got shorter and a better story. The other TFs needed at a minimum some trimming and ideally a redesign. And not just the TFs, the old arcs have some great stories locked in unfun gaming styles and could be improved greatly.

(3) AE was handled badly. First, the farming aspect - if the devs were surprised it would become a power leveling money printing tool, they were about the only ones. But they were doing something new, I can give them a pass. What they did wrong about it was try to stop it, almost hysterically so it seemed, even killing badges that people would farm for. A smarter solution would have been to say "this is a great power leveling tool that people can use if they want to, we'll make some tweaks to keep it from being completely out of control, and we'll separate in the search the 'farming' arcs from the 'story'"

Worst, it was almost abandoned over time, the new ways of telling stories never made it into AE and allowing the forbidden name filter to be broken for so long is terrible.

(4) I'm going to break my rule about being specific here, but talking about something general - there was way too much trying to force certain gameplay styles on the game. I'll say this got much better with the Freedom revamp, but still happened a bit. Examples: Bonuses so much better for teaming, fiddling with TFs so that everyone had to play the hold TF and kept minimum team sizes high, no solo incarnate path and then the solo incarnate path was held down.

I love this game (note the present tense). It is one of the games I've played the longest (I've literally been here since launch). It is probably one I've put *the most* hours into (although not if you count creating custom content - that'd prolly go to NWN). It is a GREAT game.

Doesn't mean I don't have criticisms. They're not so much "what went wrong" as "stuff I didn't like and thought could have been done better."

A few:

(1) ED and the global defense nerf. More to the point - when something needed fixing (and what ED and the GDN addressed *did* need fixing) all to often the approach was heavy handed alpha strike, followed by a very slow upward adjustment to something that felt much more 'right.' Specific point: The falloff for Ed always felt extremely inelegant. For SOs: Full strength, full strength, mostly-full strength, less-than TO, less-than TO, less-than TO. It wasn't "diminishing returns" (which is what they labelled it) - it was "normal returns" followed immediately by "the cliff."

(2) Before we had in-game power data, the only in game indication of what a power did was the text description. Of course, those of us with a bit of will could pretty easily figure out exactly what the power did anyway, but it *always* irked me that after the GDN, many power descriptions did get updated to reflect what the powers did. Saying "Resist Energies" provided "substantial energy and negative energy resistance" seemed truthful when you selected it, put in an SO, and watched a 120-point electrical attack start doing 90 points instead. It felt like false-advertising when the same thing made the 120-point attack go down to 109 points instead.

(3) They never let you start TFs with just one player. Yeah, fine, I know it's built for 8. I know the spawns won't scale down. I know the AV at the end will pwn me. Who cares? At least let me try. Just put a bunch of warnings that what I'm about to do is a bad idea, and then let me do it anyway.

(4) A big one for me: The incarnate advancement rate solo. You time-gate stuff to justify having decent chances for rarer drops. You justify making the chances for rarer drops awful because the drops aren't time gated. You don't do both.

(5) More on incarnate advancement solo. Even in spite of the drop rates, you make the rate of incarnate XP so low that you are *likely* to have collected everything you need to build a Tier 3 in the slot *before* you've even unlocked the slot?! C'mon...

(6) More on incarnate advancement solo. No way to earn Hybrid XP outside of Magisterium. Which, in spite of certain players swearing up and down that you also couldn't earn the other types of XP without BAF and Lambda when they first game out - and being dead wrong simply didn't have a precedent (you were able to convert shards to threads at the same time BAF and Lamba came out, and you could turn threads into iXP right when they came out two. I *absolutely* could unlock Jugement, etc. without ever running BAF and Lambda from the moment the two trials launched).

*Disclaimer - I'm still glad they added the solo path. I just thought the balance compared to the trial path was way off.

(7) Never got to go back and play Praetorian arcs through flashback.

(8) Awards that were extremely useful in PvE placed in PvP zones.

And just to play fair - here are some things that I thought were 'wrong' but I later changed my mind:

The difficulty of BAF, Lambda, and TPN: First few times, got my blood boiling. After that, never really had a problem with them. I was wrong to rant the way I did. I still think some of the mechanics could have been more *fun* - but the difficulty wasn't the issue I thought it was...

Honestly for me, the two biggest problems were ED and travel power suppression.

I remember utterly LOVING the mobility that Super Speed gave, then, with travel power suppression, it became zip...jerk...slow...zip...

If there were anything early on that made me want to quit, it was travel power suppression. I *still* miss the zip-zip-zip.

However... I played enough that I did pretty much everything I wanted to.

Well... first to clarify, this is not "this is where CoH went wrong and due to it the game is canceled" but instead "this is where CoH went wrong and could have gone much better"

1. Power customization: should have been a day one feature.
2. City of Villains (the game should have never set solid barriers between players)
3. Epic Archetypes (best ATs in the game were the core 10. If new ATs were designed, I would have definitively preferred they simply followed similar structure to the core 10)
4. Bases (was nowhere as easy to make a distinct looking base as it was to create a distinct looking character, they went too Lego on it's design making it too hard to create them and too hard to make them not look generic.)
5. PvP - it just was bad from day one mainly due to players ability to heal perpetually
6. PvP Revamp - PvP was bad before, but the changes added really fixed nothing.
7. Level stamped inventions.
8. Going Rogue - They didn't learn from CoV and attempted to put even more walls between players!!!
9. Their choice to pursue a lateral advancement system instead of simply adding more levels.
10. Making that lateral advancement system drop based.

Looking back at the game there were a few things that stood out to me that seemed to have created the greatest population loss in the game. Some of these I wasn't around for, but was told about how "they were handled." Mind you this is my perspective, so take it with a grain...er bucket of salt. Not in any particular order, here's my take:

Endurance Diversification and the Global Defense Nerf: While ultimately necessary, it looked like the manner in which this was handled caused a lot of anger within the game population. If there had been better communication about the reasoning behind this, and an announcement of eventual IO system, I think this would have gone over smoother. If the game had started with those in place I don't think it would have been an issue.

PvP in general: I'm certainly not a huge fan of PvP, but I know a number of folks who are. Unfortunately PvP in this game wasn't well implemented to begin with. When they did the i13 changes, with promises of more to come, they didn't follow through. While the PvP population wasn't huge, those changes sliced that population even thinner.

The Incarnate Reward system: First, not realizing there were inconsistencies within the iTrial reward system that heavily penalized Masterminds etc, not responding well to the criticism about it (and from the players perspective, not admitting there was an issue for quite a while). That included wide spread modding on the forums that angered quite a few of the more respected members of the game community. (I'm aware of quite a few well regarded Justice players who left because of that alone.) Adding more and more types of Incarnate rewards, making things more complicated then necessary. Gating Incarnate powers behind teaming to begin with, delaying a solo path for others, and then making the solo path extremely slow for those that chose that direction.

Architect Entertainment system: Not listening to the beta testers warning that the system could be abused, and then "freaking out" when the players did it? Yeah, not so good. Eventually it was brought into a balance, but getting there was U G L Y.

Advertising? What advertising?: While I'm sure Black Pebble did what he could with the budget he had, it's hard to make a working Rocket Ship with duct tape and elmers glue as your only resources.

And lastly the Invention Origin Enhancement set rewards: While the Law of Five certainly kept it from getting worse, like the AE system players found ways to exploit set bonuses. The most infamous of this was the Blessings of the Zephyr set, and the dust up when it's set bonuses were reduced. Mind you, I abused this as much as anyone, but there were times where I scratched my head and went "Really? I can get away with this? Ok."

The real failure was one of storytelling.

Issue 10 - Invasion - was, in my opinion, the gold standard for what an issue should be. Zone revamp/new zone, four arcs in that new zone that came together to tell a single story, new map tileset, and a task force to tie it all together - a fun TF, but not the actual capstone of the story.

Unfortunately, following issue 10, we had a major drought of story content. Issue 11 gave us Ouro, with its mini-TFs that just didn't satisfy in the same way. It also promised a lot more than it delivered - shouldn't there have been alternate bad futures to explore after, say, helping Manticore go evil?

Issue 12 was Cimerora, which was nothing more than a spot to have a Task Force. It also had the Midnighter arcs, which really felt more like tech demos than stories.

Issue 13 had poorly written arcs in Cimerora, that really should have tied in to Ouroborus and didn't. Also, it destroyed PvP - not terribly important to me, but I'll acknowledge that it did.

Issue 14 was the Architect - so, instead of getting dribs and drabs of stuff, we could get fanfic.

Now, getting four mini-TFs in Ouro, the Midnighter arcs, a real TF, and four arcs that are the worst written in the game (I'm looking at you, Sister Airlia and Daedalus), we got farming and fanfic.

Mind you, at this point, it had been two years since we had gotten any meaningful content, and the reply seemed to be "well, go write your own."

Issue 15 barely qualifies as an issue, just having the Khan and Cuda TFs.

Issue 16 gave us power customization and no new story content - but power customization was really worth its own issue. Still, this puts us six issues on, and we have maybe two issues worth of content in two and a half years.

Issue 17 finally starts giving us arcs, and not only that, but arcs that actually take place within Paragon and the Rogue Isles. It had only been about three years since we'd had any such content (outside of the Maguffin Quests issued by Mercedes Sheldon.)

You want to know where CoH went wrong? It needed more content with stronger writing. The only content we've seen since Issue 10 that comes close in writing? The revamped Dark Astoria of Issue 22.

And that's not even addressing the All Praetoria, All the Time problem.

Rikti War Zone. Dark Astoria. Self-contained stories, optional conclusion, zone revamp. Strong plot - First Ward was self-contained, certainly, and had some neat moments in between everything, but the random events plot was pretty horrible, and I recall thinking at the time "WHY am I going to follow Master Midnight? I want nothing to do with him, ever, even if that means going off to join the Carnival of Vengeance.."

Where was I?

Anyhow - I stayed with the game for the people, but I really like a great plot. Too bad the game chose to take a few years off from actual plot.

(Also, there were too many female NPCs stuffed into refrigerators, starting with the First Ward and continuing through SSA 1, but we won't really discuss that here.)

It was the lack of animated hair, I think.

Let's see...

• ED: This one could have been handled much, much better back when it happened. Still, there's little that could have been done about it after Jack left, so I'll leave it at that.
  
• PvP: I'm not sure PvP can ever be balanced in a game like this. I think the best you could have managed was a Rock-Paper-Scissors situation between the ATs.
  
• IO Set Bonuses: These were just flat out broken when people learned how to use them. Some extra defense is one thing, but when a non-defensive AT can be slotted to have a higher Def than a Super Reflexes scrapper running "standard" SOs, there's a problem that needs fixing.
  
• Incarnate System Advancement: This was, to be honest, something that belonged in a totally different game. And in another game, it might have been outstanding. This wasn't another game, though, and fit in as well as a sensitive body part getting shoved into the spokes of a spinning bike wheel. (Opinions differ as to just WHICH body part, however.)
  
• Super Boosters: These generated a LOT of bad will on the forums, and for good reason. All it would have taken was saying that any exclusive items in them would eventually be for sale in the market, and that would have disarmed most of it. Keeping it as it was traded some player good will for a few more sales. In the end, it doesn't seem to have been worth it.
  
• AE: Handled poorly before it even went live, and it went downhill from there. AE needed a complete overhaul of the rewards and the rating system. New powers and maps needed to reach AE faster, and new methods/tools for storytelling needed to be added. You could have also made a few extra sales by attaching a small price amount to allowing a "Real World Publish" of a slot that would have let them use "blank" NPCs and normal doors for the missions.
  
• Point Cards: While this was not anything IN the game itself, this was still a massive failure for CoX. Many times I would have purchased a points card and given the code to a friend if I could, and I know I was far from alone in this. These were lost sales, pure and simple.

Well, my 2 cents:

-Lack of advertising
-Lack of fun (Like the mini-games and events they managed to pull off in WoW; Don't reply on that)
-Lack of anything else that didn't require a team to steamroll a mob to move on to the next mob over and over up until the team spends an extra minute or so on a an Archvillain/Hero
-Lack of MASTERMIND LOVE!!! (Best Unique Archetype ever!)

And there goes my quarter...

1. Lack of diversity in missions that I think should have favored ATs and/or powersets to the point failure was a real possibility so replayability was increased.

2. Outside environments soon became just pretty wallpaper. More interactive elements and more lively atmosphere(seriously, those cranes in Independence have done nothing for years.)

3. In-game physics were never fully pursued.

4. No alternative gameplay beyond beating baddies to level your character(could in a way be related to Number 1). i.e. we never got our secret identity system or skill based system.

5. Bases were never fully realized. Not just PvP but taking a note from CO, instead of one character having an arch nemesis, the whole SG would have one and occasionally need to defend their base. I think it especially important because very few got to enjoy base-building if in a large SG so defending it against a threat, I would perceive more value in it as 'just one of the grunts'.

6. A little more voice-acting like in the beginning tutorial from the Freedom launch. I thought it had great flavor and had looked forward to it in at least another mission/story arc or two in the next Issue. never happened. Like physics, it seemed more like an experiment.

7. City Vault.

I guess closer to Suggestions and Ideas than where they went wrong but that's what I have.

First off, I think CoH was a very good game overall but there are a few places that I feel the devs made strategic blunders. However one thing to keep in mind is that hindsight is 20/20 and at the time the decisions were made these probably all seemed like good ideas.

1. City of Villains: This is one of those "seemed like a good idea at the time" items. WoW was going strong and faction rivalry and PvP were one of the reasons so trying to emulate it made a lot of sense. The problem is it didn't really work. PvP never caught on and the lack of interaction killed any real sense of faction rivalry as well as the fact that Villain side never had anywhere near the numbers of Hero side. This really became apparent with the newer Co-op content. The devs had to do mostly co-op content due to resource limits and villain players resented it. Personally I've always felt that if the option to play villains had never existed the game as a whole would have been stronger due to not needing to split development resources.
   
2. Going Rogue: This is another one of those good ideas that didn't take off. Going Rogue had four(?) new zones that today are almost empty. The problem is that while the story content is interesting it doesn't lend itself well to the sort of teaming which has always been CoH's biggest strength. Even pre-Freedom relatively few people used Preatoria for more than a few characters instead opting to create primal characters and side switch them later in part due to increased teaming options. I realize that part of the reason for doing it was to have a new boxed set to sell but it just didn't work.
   
3. Mission Architect: This is one of those things that I think they either shouldn't have done at all or should have done more thoroughly. The idea of user generated content is awesome. The problem is making the system resistant to abuse and even now it's not that great. The initial release was, frankly awful and the various exploit cycles left a bad taste in players' mouths. Combine this with a very poor rating & filter setup and the system as a whole was pretty broken. The worst part is that I think they could have made it work and if it had it would have been very, very cool.
   
4. The Incarnate System: Actually I think the Incarnate system as a whole is reasonably good the problem was that the roll-out and reward structure were flawed. I suspect that the devs feeling their way into it so this is VERY much a situation where hindsight applies and I don't really hold it against them but here are the things I felt when wrong. None of these broke the game on their own but when taken in combination they greatly diminished the appeal of what should have been a major attraction.
   1. To much focus on back-ended rewards. In normal leveling game-play the majority of rewards come from making kills, suddenly the Incarnate system comes along and changes it so that the most rewards come from completing content.
   2. Releasing four slots at once. I would rate this as the worst strategic blunder they made with the Incarnate system. Releasing four slots in a single issue convinced players that they had to grind all four slots now in preparation for the next issue. Doing a more staged release with one or two slots an issue as the content was ready would have eased players into the system better.
   3. Either to much, or not enough content segregation. One fundamental concept of any MMO reward structure is what rewards you get for specific content. IMHO the Incarnate system fell into a horrible pit where rewards were segregated enough to annoy people but not enough to really force content. The post-Alpha slots relied on Incarnate Content (which limited teaming opportunities) but didn't limit the specific Incarnate content which meant people mostly farmed the easy stuff and ignored the rest. The Hybrid slot attempted to fix this and we all know how that went. Combine this with the reward disparity between Trials and any other content and the reward system for Incarnates as a whole was just awful (the lack of a solo path for so long just made it even worse).
   4. The story. Seriously the story for where Incarnate powers came from was really, really annoying. Like most players I pretty much ignored it but it still bugged me. in a game that lets us choose our power such to such a wide degree, why oh why did the devs feel the need to choose it for us here?

I'll pass on the I13 mentions.

The Devs had ADD. One minute it's The Rikti War Zone, then it's Cimerora, now it's AE, now it's Dark Astoria, now it's Sig Arcs...there were just too many threads left hanging that should have been tied together, or at least cut.

Also, the Incarnate System made any 45-50 TF an absolute laugher. 13-18 minute RSFs, LGTFs, STFs, 10 minute ITFs...those powers should have been toned down for normal content or at least been disabled for Master runs.

Incarnate Solo path was crap. Yeah, you could get enough threads to unlock and slot your Common slot, but good luck getting a Rare slot or even an Uncommon done. On top of that, Hybrid was tied to one trial instead of the whole DA zone...meh.

It was a nice game, was fun but the Devs had new shiny syndrome to deal with from both players and within.

Problems were never fixed and always left to fester.

The game I am playing now had a problem after a patch, The devs were on the forum and investigating the problem at 5:00 AM EST. They had a patch go in by 7:00 am and were able to make adjustments during the day to take care of the problem.

Here ? Six Months ? A year ? never ?

Where CoH went wrong: Getting embroiled with NCSoft in the first place instead of finding a better, more supportive local publisher.

First off, in case any devs are reading this, please don't think I'm complaining. This list of things CoH did wrong is far, far smaller and less significant than the many, many things they did right.

1) Too many currencies. OK, Influence is money, and if we do certain thing we get reward merits. No problem. But if we do stuff in the Architect we get architect tickets... if we kill stuff in the RWZ we get Vanguard Merits... do Incarnate stuff and we get Astral and Empyrean Merits, plus two completely separate salvage paths. Too much!!

2) Since it became obvious after a year or two that absolutely everyone had alt-itis, they should have made more account-wide stuff. Black Scorpion was mentioning that they were looking into making Accolades account-wide, so alts wouldn't have to grind them out on every character. What I would have loved was a personal base that all characters could access, with a Big Box to put recipes, salvage and IOs in, preferably with a crafting table nearby.

3) The Architect. Incredible idea, but handled poorly. The text interface is clunky and the forbidden text thing was handled poorly. Too much farming, and the attempts to halt farming were heavy-handed. Worst of all, there was very little way for a good arc to rise to the top amid so much chaff.

4) Kheldians. Beyond awful at first, they got some love later but never became really good.

1. ED and GDN - were handled extremely poorly. These should never have gone in prior to the IO system being implemented. The gains in subscriptions for Going Rogue had to have been significantly offset by the loss in subscriptions due to these massive nerfs.

2. Failure to provide an endgame system early on. The incarnate system is "Ok", but should have been implemented soon after Going Rogue. Failure to provide a reason to keep playing had to play a part in the hemmorage of players over time. And please ... dont give me "the game is about the journey to 50". The game, to me, is about the characters I like the most. And I want to continue playing, and improving said characters.

3. Abandonment of sub-systems like Bases and AE. These could have been awesome systems with a little love, but like most things they were rushed out half done and then abandoned in favor of the next new shiny.

4. No expansion of the world. The world is small, and there is a significant number of MMO players who want to explore. This game offers little attraction to that segment of players.

5. No real improvement to the GUI. It still looks dated even with the marginal improvements they made. Character models look even more dated.

1. Bases. I get that they are a tangled mess, but who is to fault for that? That would be the dev(s) who initially created the base system. Maybe someone should have been overseeing the project a little more in case ..you know.. in the future they wanted to change things in it or add to it without breaking everything.

2. CoV. I beta tested it and even bought it. I never played it though once it went live. I never played "villains" until GR came out and I could make my villains heroes. Making this a separate game was stupid imo. CoV should have been an expansion of just new archetypes and zones, but leaving the "morality" of it how it is now...in other words - side switching should have been ingrained in CoV.

3. Gifting. This should have been something that was actually feasible; especially after FREEDOM went live.

4. Exalted: Stupid idea. Why do the devs constantly try to separate the population: CoV, GR, and Exalted.

5. When ED was introduced...IOs should have been introduced.

6. Global badges: Anniversary etc. Because I didn't make a toon in 2005 I can't get the year 1 badge on that toon...kinda silly.

7. Power Customization should have been MUCH sooner AND should have included power pools as well as APP/EPP.

8. Inherents: I am looking at you Blaster/Defender inherent 1.0.

9. LFG: This system was borked from the get go. It made no sense and the LFG channel should have been implemented much sooner.

10. NO I am not a soloist, but I would have liked to have seen some incarnate content for the soloer/small group. Some days I wouldn't have minded more diversity and just teaming with 1-2 more people for incarnate goodies.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!