Where CoH went wrong

These last two weeks are going to send a wave of emotions throughout the community. I'm fine with you guys expressing any of them as long as it's within reason. One thing I will be extra sensitive about, though, is trolls. If you troll this forum over these last days, I will remove your posts first and then, if your activity continues, I will ban.

This community deserves better.

Thanks.

IANAD (I Am Not A Dev)


HOWEVER, I do agree that while both COV and GR introduced incredible content and systems, which certainly injected new life into the game, they did have the unintended side-effect of also dividing the player base.

It was definitely a concern that we as a studio had. This was why with Freedom you saw the Unified Tutorial, so that you could at least choose your path versus having it thrust on you. There were other plans in the works, some more solid than other.

We were in a bit of a sticky pickle. If we homogenized content too much, there would be no uniqueness to being a Hero or Villain. But it was also nearly impossible to create enough unique content for six different factions. Players don't want generic content that works for both Heroes and Villains, they want great content that makes them feel truly heroic or villainous.

I think that's one of the reasons that for a lot of the content over the past few years, you started to see much more intense storylines, with greater weight placed on consequences.

So to wind this back up to the beginning, I'm not sure I'd say that COH went wrong with having multiple factions. They did have a tremendously positive impact on the game. But I think in hindsight, there were a lot of consequences down the line that no one could have seen coming.

Whether or not anyone could have seen them coming...
Nothin's perfect!

Sometimes things that'll cause some other problems are still worth doing.
What was that motto that Tom Cruise's character in Risky Business says?

It's also possible that some of the original coding was "sloppy" compared to current coding practices. I'm sure they linked things in some ways to "make it work", that caused other issues when more code was added later on. The equivalent would be changing the wall switch in your house which then somehow causes the neighbor's sprinkler four blocks down to stop working right.

Honestly, while it's true that CoV split the playerbase it was a necessary evil to make them at least feel like villains. I don't think the tech was far enough back then for side switching so unfortunately it was.."the only way".

I mean, if you've ever played DCUO you'll know how having heroes and villains running around is somehow worse than dividing your playerbase in half.

While I'm somewhat adverse to any of this coming off as the reason why it was shut down, as I don't believe any faults that the game had were reason enough (individually nor collectively). It's a great, successful and profitable gaming business venture.

That said:

The thing that went wrong with it, in my opinion, is the lack of publicity.
I don't think that has much anything to do with the quality of them game, just simply, as people regularly pointed out throughout the game's existence, the lack of advertising.

Despite the low/nonexistent budge for advertising, I do think they did a better job over the past year. While we, as fans, may not have thought so, the publicity they kept getting with online sites and with more social media was better than previous times (I think).

The big problem, at this point, is that most of the gaming world (uh, most of the world) is jaded when it comes to age. That game is how old? It doesn't even matter how great the game may be (nor how much better the game is for HAVING all of those years behind it), you've already lost some people who simply will not even try a game that old.

So, I can see how the biggest problems of the game may have been something much earlier on (before I came here), because mmorpgs really require that big surge early on in order to have more people to slowly lose.

I know that the original game was not one I was interested in playing. I only checked it out briefly, at a friend's house, while I was busy loving my other mmorpg from a galaxy far afar away.
It wasn't until that game was NGE'd and after CoH had added a lot of great things (ragdoll, weapon customization, villains, wings, Vanguard and Rikti shtuff) that I fell in love with this game.
I don't say that as a bad thing though. While this game was not necessarily for me from the start... it became a game that I dearly loved and have been subscribed to ever since (and planned to continue to be for a long time to come... even after I could have played for free).

So what you're saying is, we needed more TV commercials with Chuck Norris and Mr. T.

ED and GDN were colossal missteps. Many people have forgotten, but the outrage over that literally destroyed the forums.

PvP -- I'm a huge fan of PvP. I had to sell my copy of Halo to get my life back, and I have no idea how many hours I played multiplayer Call of Duty 1 & 2. But in a rock-paper-scissors MMO? It fundamentally doesn't work. And worst of all was the spill-over into PvE. Travel Suppression has no reason to exist outside of PvP, yet it affected everything, making one of the best aspects of the game borked. Once "good enough" alternatives to travel powers opened up (helllloo Ninja Run + Sprint! and the earnable jet- and jump-pack) I never took another travel power again.

Good ideas poorly executed -- AE, bases and IOs are chief among these.

• AE -- Player-made content is a no-brainer for community vitality. But when it was first announced everyone said that Sturgeon's Law was going to be a severe underestimate as to the quality of the storytelling. When we finally got a taste of how it worked, warnings of the exploits were ignored and -- my personal bugaboo about this game -- using the in-game story to explain game mechanics slapped you in the face with the "virtual reality holodeck" aspect of the AE.

• Bases -- this is kind of related to cramming PvP into the game, with no clear plan as to how base raids would work. Making bases just wasn't fun. I've seen screenshots (and videos) of incredible player-made personal housing in Star Wars Galaxies. To make an incredible base here required too much investment of time and needed too large a group of people. And yet most still looked like a poorly-lit basement. Where were the personal lairs? The Batcave? Peter Parker's apartment? Avengers mansion? The Hall of Justice? The Satellite of Love? I mean, just look at this one-person abode in SWG. It's GIGANTIC. And it has NPCs moving around in it. Why weren't CoH's bases 10 times better?

• IOs -- A lot of people claim that IOs were the reason for ED, but they were added so many years later that I find that hard to believe. It feels more like IOs were added to mitigate the damage ED/GDN did to the original ATs. I also think they're too complicated. I know a lot of people simply didn't bother with them because of that aspect.