Where CoH went wrong

pvp- felt like like it was tacked on the a pve game. I dont think the i13 changes helped although seemed to be for good intentions just a bit on the heavy handed side.


AE-Very good idea very good concept on paer, but implemented, seemed unfinished and or lot of things that was not forseen cropped up. It eneded up exaberating the farming rate and problem. I do wish there wasa way to make it easier to find good written AE arcs out of the ones that were solely made for farming.


Exaulted- Another server that I do not think was needed at that point in time. Seems to just splinter the player base even more across the already numerous servers.


LFG- I think it should of stayed in the oven a bit longer. Another great idea on paper but not in practice.


Not enough solo based end of game content. The rate for earning Incarnate stuff solo compared to teaming was too wide.


Too much chance based things. Everything based on chance. Sometimes I couldnt tell if I was playing a hero game or gambling in a casino MMO.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mauk2 Evil_Legacy became one of my favorite posters with two words. "Kick Rocks." I laffed so hard. Never change, E_L!

1. Enhancement Diversification was a disaster. Of PR and mechanics.

2. Separating the Rogue Isles and Paragon City. Crippled red side from the get go.

3. Reward Merits. While the devs realized their error in later content (like Incarnates) reward merits killed vast swathes of content obsolete while doing nothing to help the content no one liked anyway.

Those are the big three for me. There are many other things I might have done differently, but the devs did a great job all things considered.

Invention Origin set bonuses... in my opinion it would have been better to have a hard cap on the various bonuses (possibly with sharply diminishing returns past the cap) to keep them from really getting out of hand.

The crafting system didn't need all those ingredients.

The Incarnate system and associated rewards and methods of accruement...

Merits of all sorts.

While I personally detest PvP, it certainly seemed harsh to turn the whole thing on its head and then never go back to it.

Character-specific costume unlocks.

It's been a while since I played proper but there were two things that drove me off after a bit:

#1: Separating the villains from the heroes almost completely. Very very little interaction. IIRC I even had to log a toon on the hero side to see if my friend was on.

and #2: Too many repetitive and somewhat grindy missions. Getting those missions from the newspaper thingy it was always the same few maps and the same few mission types (and of those, there were only a few types I did consistently; I never ever took the escort missions).

@Xiang Shao, wow, that pic broke my heart, but mostly because of some bad things that happened involving a dog I loved named Rex.

Here's hoping they think about CoH2, but go about it in a better way. To me, CO will always be a cheap knockoff of CoH/CoV.

Looks like the boards ate my last post.

Anyway: more permissive trial accounts (and then more permissive F2P accounts). With no broadcast and no ability to start a team (definitely happened in the trial accounts, not sure about F2P) it meant that new players could very easily feel isolated.

I had friends who started the trial but quit in only a few days - if I wasn't there to open the game up in terms of teaming and talking to them, they felt quite isolated. That's not how you want potential players to feel.

Wow, I can't believe I forgot this in my previous post, but they should never, ever have removed, or reduced the requirements for, badges that people already had.

I can understand reducing the requirements for the Empath badge from 10 billion to 1 billion, and again to 100 million. Nobody could possibly get it. It was estimated that even if the healy-est healer were to spam heals 24/7, it would take 17 years to get the badge.

However, I practically screamed when I came back from a break and saw that the requirements for the Back From The Future badge had been reduced from 1,000 pillboxes to 100. During a particularly obsessive badging period, I spend countless, countless hours hunched over the keyboard, taking pillboxes in RV with my Warshade, mostly solo. I still remember the look in my 8 year old's eyes as he stood by my desk, begging me to play catch with him in the backyard, just this once. "No, dear," I would say as I ruffled his hair, "daddy still has 327 pills to go! But we'll have three minutes while the zone is resetting. Hand me that crumpled piece of paper, I'll toss it to you a few times."

Okay, I'm kidding there. But if I had a kid, I probably would have neglected him as I put in those countless hours grinding pills, just to see my badge counter ding. When they reduced it, I was so incredibly POed that I gave up badging until this past month.

Outleveling content.

Even with Ouroboros, it just seems weird for a hero to let a crime take place just because it's beneath his notice. We should have been able to accept grey missions, even if they awarded no experience or rewards.

Given that they were boldly going where no MMO and few game devs had gone before, I don't think they went wrong in as much as they were stumbling through unblazed trails. And the game still lasted over eight years. I can't blame 'em for that.

That said, the PR disaster that was ED and the lesser PR disaster of Issue 13 were definitely unforced errors.

Forced GFX in a game which touted (and rightfully so) customisation as one of its strengthes has always irked me. I would have loved an option to have no FX or prop at all for any given powerset - i.e., playing a sword set without any sword in your hand, or a shield powerset without having to wear a shield. The case could be made it'd look silly, but so did, say, a giant big guy wearing pink shorts with a baby face, cat ears and a demon's tail, or any other crazy costume combination you could think of. There's nothing wrong with looking silly, if it results from a conscious player choice.

For something less personal and objectively more important I'll have to go with what B_L_Angel says. There was a culture in this game to develop new stuff consistently, and move on to newer stuff before making sure what came before was implemented correctly or fixed. The whole game felt like a building without sound foundations, where each tenant fancied themselves an architect and started their own renovations and additions without a care for how it'd fit in the greater whole.

Just about everything related to CoV.

-Segmenting the playerbase
-The fact that you are rarely, if ever, taken seriously. People treating you as a minion works while you're still low level, but once you pass a certain point, people should start showing some respect. They never do. Don't even get me started on Hardcase.
-The whole Destined One storyline. I like Arachnos as an organization. I like the Arachnos characters. The storyline just sucked. If Arachnos wanted to use me for something, their methods needed to change over time. As above, treating me as a minion should have only worked while I was a relative unknown in the Isles. There should have been a point at which orders became requests, and then requests became ever more subtle, or more generous in the compensation
-The eventual nearly complete abandonment of villain content. I didn't roll Red-side so I could end up as a Blue Sidekick. The excuse was that there weren't enough Red Siders to justify decent Red side content. Maybe if there had actually been some decent Red side content, there would have been more Red siders.
-Longbow. Just...oh my god. Were there any CoV zones without Longbow? Were the any CoV missions without Longbow? (that's exaggeration for effect, btw) They may have been the single most overused NPC group in the game.
-Bases. As soon as they realized that the CoP and base PvP were crap (and my (admittedly biased) recollection is that the playerbase realized it pretty much immediately) they needed to completely revamp the base construction system. Making it so you could only earn Inf OR Prestige was also a terrible idea.
-The abandonment of some of CoV's unique enemy groups (Coralax, Light Mages, even Longbow Jr aka Wyvern) after the early levels in favor of Longbow, Longbow, and the same old groups we'd been fighting in CoH for years. (Oh look. More Thorns. Oh look. More Rikti. Oh look, Longbow and Thorns/Rikti.)
-etc.

One thing CoV got right is that it at least gave you some opportunities to get away from Statesman and his hanger-ons. If you ignored most of the mission text, you could at least pretend to be a bad person doing bad things for your own reasons.
That, and I prefer the CoV ATs almost universally over the CoH ones. So that's a pretty big win for CoV.

CoH lost a battle of attrition with its customer base by stubbornly adhering to principles that needed to change and "selective listening". It wasn't one specific thing or group. It was the base builders over here, the pvp players over there, the soloist, the villain, the non incarnate grinder, the non Praetorian and, in general, the disenfranchised. Like it or not, when it came to influencing positive change in CoH lets just say that some players were more influential than others... and it wasn't always based on the validity of the argument. The way the devs and the community treated these "minority" groups did not help the cause (for example, an "I do not pvp therefore precious resources should not be wasted on pvp" attitude). People insisting, to this day, that "everything is fine" did not do the game an overall service. They are just as bad as those who say "everything sucks".

Sometimes the devs "sticking to their guns" reached the level of the ridiculous. What real harm would have come to bumping base storage numbers sooner, switching pvp back to the way it was, having female mastemind pets,or doing a hundred other little things that would have promoted happiness?

And now (gulp) comes the really hard part to say. I honestly believe that CoH could have done a better job in the integrity department. I'm not saying anyone purposely "lied". But the players were told too many things on too many occasions that, in the end, simply did not (for whatever reason, legit or not) pan out. I have had devs look me straight in the eye from a couple of feet away and tell something (which I in turn, with permission, spread to the entire community) that did not happen. I gotta to tell ya that's a hard thing to "get over"... regardless of how much love you have for the game and those who play it. I wish I could say I was alone in having that feeling, but I know for a fact I am not.

In the end, it all unfortunately added up and CoH was sunk.