Where CoH went wrong

I forgot to add: The sheer number of hero zones. The zone number could have been easily cut in half but instead we had empty places like:

Boomtown: Only reason I saw people going there was for the one mission during Synapse TF.

Eden: Just a zone that gets in the way on your jaunt to The Hive.

Crey's Folly: Uhmm Jurassik was there.

Faultline: Saw a short surge in people when it was revamped....it has been a ghost town since.

Terra Volta: Respec... and then uhm... hunting Freak bosses?

Chantry, FBZ, Storm Palace, Cascade Archipelago: Nice to look at but a pain to get around. Hunt Seers and then what....a nice looong tf or two?

Croatoa: Once a popular zone but now even Sally rarely bothers to show up.

The Hollows: See Faultline. I remember back in I3-7 when The Hollows was a happening place. Even Frostfire and Atta couldn't save this zone.

Skyway: Ya got the Synapse TF there and Babbage...otherwise pretty much just a big empty zone.

Galaxy City: We all saw what happened with that.

So where did I see people?? Atlas, Kings Row, Steel Canyon, Perez Park, Independence Port, Talos, Brickstown, Founders Fall, and Peregrine Island.

If I saw a zone event pop up in other zones I didn't bother going because I knew getting people together would be a PITA.

This of course does not include Red or Gold side.....
I wish blue side had been as small and simple as red side.

29 pure hero zones...and 10 pure villain zones (Not counting Oro on either side or any co-op zones).

9 Gold zones.

Yeah - let's spread people out even more LOL!

Quote:

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

I suppose the easiest way to address the OP's question is to study on my periods of waxing and waning interest in the game. I've been subscribed continuously since Dec '04. I haven't always logged in equally frequently.

The first major round of disaffection came with GDN followed by ED. This sent me over to Warcraft for the better part of a year. Since most of my characters were and still are tankers and scrappers, it gutted them worse than it did others. The game got a lot less fun then; more importantly, it got a bad reputation for drastic nerfs that it didn't shake for a long time. I still have people on my global friends list whose accounts went dark around that time.

I got sick of Warcraft, though maybe not fast enough. Inventions piqued my interest, but what really brought me back was Cimerora, which became a must to unlock for dozens of my ancient themed characters. I began playing daily for a period of several years around that time.

The second and much less vigorous falling off of interest came with Incarnate Trials. I had planned on mostly ignoring that stuff, and concentrating as I always had on new alts and new powerset combinations and character concepts. All of a sudden everybody wanted to grind max level raid content instead of running the TFs that were my levelling standbys. Fortunately I got most of my level 50 tankers and scrappers through Trapdoor before that encounter was broken and they had to go look for a controller to solo it for them. But endgame grind was what I came back to CoH to get away from.

I never quite shook the sneaking suspicion that the dev team never fully grasped what they had created. Over and over again, I got the impression that they considered the game too easy and wanted to make it harder. Villains gave that impression; I never enjoyed levelling redside as much as I did blueside, because I thought it was harder.

Going Rogue certainly gave that impression. I got maybe two characters through Praetoria. One timed mission full of Seers at level 15 is enough. The superior craft of the Praetoria stories was lost because the zone and missions were so hard. It was much more fun for me to just run radios in KR until you get level 10 and TF your way to 50 with plenty of merits. And missions like that are decidedly team unfriendly. Blueside, it was just simpler to pick the enemy groups that were fun and easy to fight.

There are plenty of game mechanic issues that were addressed far too late in the game's lifetime. I will admit that I powerlevelled my own characters and helped powerlevel others. Mandatory Stamina, and earlier, 22 for SOs were the engines that drove all of my powerlevelling. I don't think I ever powerlevelled a character from 1 to 50 but I powerlevelled plenty from 1 to 25. The invention system fixed part of the enhancement problem, but inherent Fitness came way too late to do much good. All of my old guides were written before inherent Stamina. Reading them is telling. "You do want this toggle, but you can postpone taking it until level 22, when you can get SOs and have Stamina to sustain it." This is why I powerlevelled.

And the same mechanics that motivated powerlevelling past the early game also meant that the game showed its worst face to new players. Especially since nothing ever explicitly told them that they had to postpone taking the powersets they chose so they could have Stamina by 20, even if they had to in order to keep up with players who did.

<《 New Colchis / Guides / Mission Architect 》>
"At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths'?" - Harlan Ellison

Some of the streamlining attempts within the past few years just made the game feel a little too bland:

1. The new sewer trial. Sewer runs were the time honored tradition way to level up a new toon, and then to be dumped in KR to get your radio so you can get your first bank mission and get your first temp travel power, which leads to...
2. Getting travel powers too early vs. at level 14, like it used to be. I'm probably in the minority on this sentiment.

Paragon pretty much made their KR and Hollows worthless with those 2 changes, and I used to love grouping up in Hollows.

Also, the stamina and health mechanics before they made them automatic powers. It was nice that they fixed this, but it shouldn't have taken them so long.

And now that I think about it, they waited way to long to give us an MA secondary for blasters. We should have had that years ago.

Paragon could have made some changes to SG mechanics to make them easier to stay together/active. Maybe have an option to allow new alts to automatically join SGs if you already have a toon in one. That could have helped with community building especially since alts were an important part of the game.

I always thought the zones were to small for how fast we could move. I wish each zone was the size of all the Shadow Shard zones put together.

No duels in open areas like Pocket D or under the Atlas statue and the i13 in general. That would have been great fun to both watch and participate in and I think would have done some good for making pvp more popular in this game.

AE was not upgraded enough it could have been so much more. It was the single most anticipated issue for me. I loved the **** and me and my one friend had a blast playing and yes even exploiting it to see where exactly we could push the limits. But alas it was nerfed so much and not enough new features made its way. Like AE player created PVP scenarios would have been a dream come true for me.

The big things for me anyway things that could have been awesome and I defiantly enjoyed a great deal but community s that were in the long run ignored AE and PVP. That's where the game went wrong IMO.

I always enjoyed street sweeping . Early in the game you would see other heroes out and about then it changed and you might see someone zip by to enter a door. I thought the GDN was wrong Ed and the intro of IO's were too long apart. I liked it when they increased exps.COV fractured the player base as did Going Rogue. There were many times I wished Heroes and villians were both active and visible in Paragon City areas.

They were kind of screwed from the beginning from the engine they used.

PvP wasn't as imbalanced as some people seem to think. Different ATs performed better against other ATs. While some were outclassed or just not good (mostly the epic ATs), PvP was still great fun. Unfortunately, I13 butchered the PvP community on my server.

I don't know if it's "went wrong" so much as "missed opportunity". But given how much of the playtime came from replay on alts, I always wanted CoH to embrace that. (Or other MMOs for that matter.)

For a simple example, that 30 second logoff time. It seems like a small deal. But over years of play and dozens of characters, I probably spent hours just on that timer. And then hours more when I was on a team, someone volunteered to switch ATs, and we all waited his timeout. (Plus login, load, zone, etc.) It just screamed "wasted time" to me, and for those of us who have trouble carving out gaming time already it's just an insult.

Also I think MMOs should all make collections (like badges) be account-wide. Make them harder if need be, to give badgers more challenge. But especially when little rewards are attached, why take what's already (usually) a grind and make it repetitive? I think it would actually be more encouraging for alts if I knew they'd get instant access to a costume piece or small Accolade I'd earned. Instead I dreaded having to do some of those grinds again, let alone know who needed what. Which leads me to:

Keeping track of alts was probably what burned me out of the game, and why I stopped being a subscriber after several years. When the Incarnate system came in - which wasn't a bad idea - I now found that on top of managing builds I also had to track who had completed which tiers in which order to get which rewards for which content. And this was around the same time we've also got morality missions and alignment merits, and I just got so tired of keeping track.

So in summation, I think one of CoH's great strengths - the variation you get by playing different ATs and powersets - became a weakness when more vertical content multiplied my horizontal choices and turned play into too much spreadsheet work. I think realizing the benefit of alts and designing for it would have been a major asset for the game.

I've come to resent what Incarnate powers (or really, just specifically Judgement) has done to the game at 45-50. It makes a huge gulf between the people who have incarnate powers (including a level shift) and the people who don't - first of all if you're on a 50 team and you're <50, you're two levels down from the incarnates, which has to be frustrating.

But what I really can't stand is Judgement spam. It makes the game way too easy and very, very boring, especially when you've got 3+ incarnates so almost every spawn is getting hit and nuked.

Grouping enemies together? unnecessary, judgement has huge area. Mezzing enemies? they're already dead. trying to reposition yourself to line up a cone or whatever? again, already dead.

I try really hard not to use judgement when I'm teaming. I'm here - and I assume everyone else is - to play the game, not to watch "Judgement Critical!" pop up 20 times every 20 seconds.