Lessons from CoH

Yet another gaming site I hadn't heard of before, I think Australia based, has a parting article about CoH. It showed they hadn't played much or in a while or blue side.

Ten lessons that other MMO developers must learn from the death of City of Heroes

Here's my rebuttal, as I'm not signing up for yet another website.

DON’T have only one quest line and one tutorial.

CoH has pretty much always let you skip the tutorial.

For the longest time, it had not one, but THREE tutorials.

Hero
Villain
Praetorian

After F2P, it was condensed into:

Hero/Villain (Choose your alignment)
Praetorian

Again, all entirely skippable.



Originally there were multiple origin-based quest lines. But they were all, nominally, identical and just not done very well.

Now there's a singular set quest path that can take you up into your teens (level-wise) that's quite well done.
Or you can play around in the Mission Architect.
Or you can simply hop onto a team and complete some of the low level raids that'll take you into your teens-to-20's in short order.

Lots and lots of options.




DON’T wait too long to go free-to-play.

Back when the game started, there was no way for them to F2P.
Later, they simply didn't have the staff to do an F2P conversion.
Finally they were able to convince NCSoft to allow them to do the conversion.

The real issue was this. Not so much F2P. But a method of monetizing content (a cash shop).
For pretty much the entire 4-1/2 years I played, players were basically screaming for ways to buy MORE stuff and give City of Heroes MORE money (see "Shut up and take my money!").
If they could have done something similar with actual meat-space merchandise that would have helped too.
Look at all the various charities and projects that CoH players have contributed money to over the years. Lots and LOTS of disposable cash.

The REAL lesson is "Allow your players to give you their money".


DON’T screw over former paid members when you do go free-to-play.

Lines have to be drawn somewhere. Especially when talking about Free players.

Masterminds and classes sporting pets are actually fairly resource-intensive. As such, it was one of the classes tapped for "paid for".
So you could pay to unlock the class. Or play one of your other toons.
As opposed to the sub model where you lost access to EVERYTHING when you stopped paying your sub.




DON’T slip a giant ***** cannon into a level and think we won’t notice.

Really? No. REALLY? They couldn't come up with a real objection? So you had to take "Well when you look at it from this angle, it looks like a wang!" and complain about it?




DON’T give up on the superhero genre.

Trust me. The CoH community hasn't.

There's a diaspora going on now (of course).

However, work has NOT ceased on trying to rescue the property from oblivion. So keep your eyes peeled.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

I don't care how many tutorials you have as long as I can skip them after the first time. Unless it's just an awesome tutorial.

Well, I don't agree with anything listed from this article, but I did very much enjoy having the two different tutorials for Paragon and the Rogue Isles.
Of course, those were for two different games, so...

Still, I liked the separate Praetorian tutorial for that realm as well.

I can't really argue against Arcanaville's use of "ridiculous", because I do like me some ridiculousness.

I think there is some merit to those very different starts... And I find the merit it brought to be a quality I enjoy.

All that being said... a "lesson" that no game should have a single tutorial is... the brand of "ridiculous" that I do not enjoy.

I think the multiple tutorial question depends on what kind of tutorial it actually is.