f13.net

NCSoft just reported their financial results and they were well below analyst forecasts.  The biggest reason was lower than expected royalties from Taiwan due to fewer NCSoft players, as well as continued financial losses at their US and European subsidiaries.  I'm sure now there will be more pressure than ever to get games like Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa out sooner rather than later.

The figures below are for December compared to September:

Lineage I "Monthly Access" - 2,085,385 down from 2,366,798

Lineage II "Monthly Access" - 2,065,187 up from 1,516,632
(This is entirely due to launch in China.  Without China's numbers, they'd be down to 1,413,535.)

City of Heroes - 124,435 down from 163,053

Bruce

Man, someone should put this shit in chart form.

I kid.

Don't be a tool. It was funny, but really, please?

Also, 124k is still a respectable number for CoH, IMO. That's 124k AFTER the 6-month period AND during the release of EQ2 and WoW.

Don't forget that COH's numbers will probably do a nice jump when they release the PVP arenas patch (issue 4 around March) as well as CoV.

There are many people still considering or waiting to get a copy of WoW. Those numbers will drop a bit more, I think.

BTW: What did Daoc lose?

City of Heroes - 124,435 down from 163,053

A 24% drop is harsh, especially if it includes all of the holiday purchases.  But shit, if thats the combined effect of WoW and EQ2 coming out I'd say they're doing OK.  Lets not forget that a certain percentage of any game's base is really just waiting for the Next Big Thing, and WoW/EQ2 probably took just about all of them right out.

And it still leaves over 11,000 players per live server, assuming that buff and dual accounts are minimal. (I've never seen any evidence of CoH buffbots anywhere personally.)   I saw AP instances on Liberty the other night, and there still seem to be plenty of players about.  

I would love to see what the numbers look like after Issue 4 with its PvP.

Next weekend that number increments up one. Too busy with the superbowl crap this weekend. But Cosmo flies again!

Anyone who's on Freedom has an open invite for some powerlevel lovin'

Mythic has been unwilling to release any new numbers yet for DAoC, but since the concurrent peak users has dropped by at least 30%, a corresponding drop in subscribers will put you in the right ballpark.

Bruce

You have to remember, though, that an account is still active once you cancel the billing since they use a "pay in advance" subscription model so those numbers presumably don't reflect people, like myeslf, who cancelled their accounts in December after their December rebilling dates and therefore had active accounts into January.

Edit: fixed typos

I have a friend who plays DAOC who swears on his mother's soul that alot of DAOC players who left for WoW and EQ2 have come back to the game.

Of course, this guy hardly ever talks to his mother so take it for what it's worth. I personally think he's deluding himself.

My esteem was (http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/node/385) 20% and still is from my own noob charts.

Well, you can see the dropoff in concurrency numbers is on the order of 30% - 33% here:
http://daoc.darkzone.net/graphs/index.php?server=us-servers

But it's really not fair to assume that everyone who left to play EQ2 or WoW -- which they obviously did -- actually unsubscribed to DAoC.  And I'm sure some people did go and try WoW and then decided to go back to DAoC.  So actual sub numbers could have dropped much less... at least 20%, maybe 25%, but not necessarily a full 33%.

Bruce

As far as I know, none of the latest generation of MMO games reveals their concurrent user numbers.  Is DAOC a dying breed in that regard?  With all of their problems keeping subscribers, I wouldn't be surprised if they end up going with the "Low - Medium - High" listings per server.

From the European perspective :

The European DAoC servers have lost about 1/3 of their population too and WoW isn't even out here yet (though it is in final beta), neither has EQ2 drawn significant numbers. Don't forget that the European servers account for like 40 % of the DAoC population.

DAoCs decline isn't just due too tougher competition (read : EQ2/WoW), but also simply because the game is over it's peak. The decline also set in well before the advent of WoW or EQ2. Hence those mystical droves of ppl who returned quickly from WoW are not going to save the numbers.

Lastly the declining CoH numbers don't surprise me. Reception in Europe has been a bit lacklustre and the imminent European release of CoH aren't going to add many subscribers.
In comparison, Blizzard have already racked up 110.000 preorders for WoW in Europe. With the Korean release expect WoW to get twice as big as it already is.

AC1 and AC2 did, or at least they used to, but both sites I know what were tracking them have stopped.  I don't know if Lineage 2 does, but NCSoft is pretty open about all of their numbers in ther financials even if they don't show them to their players in-game.

Killer from CRS recently released a chart showing the number of concurrent users playing WWIIOL over time, but again, this isn't something that is shown at login or in-game.

Bruce

Unfortunately, the concurrent user numbers don't support that assertion, either:
http://daoc.darkzone.net/graphs/index.php?server=eu-servers

Clearly EQ2 and WoW had an impact.  Perhaps people were getting bored with the game before then, but ...



I don't think they are expected gangbuster numbers, but I'm sure they would like to stop the bleeding and try to regarin even 20,000 or so users.

It's interesting that the impact of EQ2/WoW on Ultima Online has been minimal... I guess everyone who wanted to leave already did so last year.

Bruce

I myself let my subscription slip to coh but its not because I dont like the game its because I have no freaking time to play all the games I like. I fully intend to resub once the city of villians thing comes out and the super secret non combat stuff comes out.

Kaid

Surely that's entirely as expected ?  Those who are still there are obviously uncaring about the shiney and have stated their preference time and time again.  It's not like it's not an OLD game.

RE: CoH loosing subscribers. It's to bad. CoH really is the better game when compared with either WoW or EQ2.

I may be in the minority, but I *LIKE* summoning hurricanes and tornadoes.

How much do these numbers really matter anymore?

We've seen that games like EVE, SB, and AC2 can manage to be profitable despite embarrassingly low sub counts.  We know that devs can and will merge servers when numbers go down to keep server populations up.  

So lets say that CoH (or any game) just absolutely shits itself.   They drop to 30,000 subs.  They merge servers, layoff some CSRs, sell some hardware.  

Server pops stabilize on the shorter server list.  At worst maybe you have to change your character's name.

What am I missing?

CoH does a part of the other "more complete" games very very well.  However, as predicted it doesn't have staying power.  I grew tired of it after a month. WoW has me for at least a total of 4-5 months even through some of its shortfallings.

Their PvP will interest me, but I will be too busy with WoW and Guildwars PvP to really care enough to actually resub.

I think the staying power you refer to means an economy and stronger reasons to group...

In related news (and also noted on the CoH forum here). EU CoH launches today, so expect a sharp rise in subs.

Also noted in the CoH forum is the fucking stupid nature of the server segregation arrangements.

Ok, wait.... how the fuck is 124k subscribers for COH bad? How is it "bleeding?" I'm not getting it here.

Chances are they can probably be profitable with as little as 50k subs, and as much as 100k subs. From all NCSoft has said, they peaked at about 160k or so subs. Sure, it is a 30% drop from the last quarter. But it's a 6-month old game, in a market where 6-months can be all or nothing. I'm sure that WWII Online, Horizons, Neocron, or Shadowbane would be tickled fucking pink with 124k subscribers, or even half that? Are we so myopic in our view that we think there has to be a "one true game" that dominates the market still? We're past that. We now have a 600k game in WoW, a 300-400k game in EQ, a 200-300k game in SWG, a 200k game in DAoC, and CoH sits pretty comfortably below that. Did anyone expect CoH to get 200k subs when it was released? Hell, did anyone expect 100k?

I don't see these as bad numbers, especially not for NCSoft. Look at NCSoft's current lineup. It's VERY Asian-centric. Last I heard, Lineage 2 bombed in the US, topping at maybe 60k subscribers, while doing gangbusters in Asia. So they have no real successes in the North American market... except CoH, which does respectable numbers in a crowded MMOG market.

I'm not seeing the reason this is such bad news for CoH.

That and crafting, items of any kind, versatility and quantity of races/classes, larger world, versatility/quantity of powers, etc.

I saw what the game was like or ever going to be like after a month of play.  After that it was just having numbers increase and killing more non-human-players.

Badges and different colored tights won't keep my sub.

CoH doesn't need economy/crafting per se, but it does need, alternative advancement tracks.

The out of combat skill system may help with that in i5.



Don't disagree, but there is plenty of hard content that requires groups. The only reason people don't use at low levels is that the low xp curve mean people can make progress witout groups. You can't do that at high levels.



That's easy - the reason it is presented as bad news is that the original poster *always* posts CoH stuff as bad news.

Of course, if we eliminiated all the posts on this board that include excessive spin applied in order to make the facts fit the posters own world view, we wouldn't have much left.

I'm not sure if anyone's noticed, but realistic economies are not exactly the forte of CoH's source material.  Heroes are either so shit-rich that they get whatever they want (Iron Man, Batman, etc.), technically dirt poor in ways that don't matter to their crimefighting (Spider-man, Superman) or just financially androgenous.  

I don't want a superhero game where mutants in tights hawk plasma pistols on street corners for influence.

Not only that.

CoH has certain weaknesses that the newest example of MMOG does better.

CoH missions get repetitive. Sure they follow a storyline, but the delivery of that is bland. The mission NPCs are so bland and uninteresting. Flavor it up a bit. Delivery and variety are important here.

Give me more variety in my city and hunting areas. Up to about level 24, all I ever see are modern urban areas. I dont just want Steel Canyon, I want the city in 5th Element. The newer zone Hollows just ended up being a wrecked version of Kings Row - boring. EQ has a wide variety of Planes, and so do comics. I want that too. I want to visit alien worlds. You have the vast expanse of a comic book multiverse, so give me more variety. Maybe it gets much better as I level up, but the low levels didnt have enough variety to satisfy me. Only missions provided a change from the typical urban streets.

CoH has a lot of strengths that are good for about 1 to 3 months. Then people feel they want more, or something else. The next plateau, perhaps. I say all this with love for the game. I think it has many great aspects. It also feels great to fly around.

It may be that this is really more of a compliment.  Comparing the Quality of CoH to EQ2 and potentially WoW - one might expect higher numbers because many of use "feel" it is a better game.

As mentioned above - the EU servers are going up now - that is going to hit the sub numbers pretty good.  And as also mentioned - Issue 4 and CoV are going to turn things around more so I bet.

Very well said.

The badges held no real interest for me. Getting a new costume set was cool, but I can change my appearance in other games much more often. It is also a constant source of achievement in other games, to continually update my appearance.

I like finding that sword or staff with the glowing red particles coming out of it. I like items that I can wear in public.

Have to agree here. There is a lot to like in CoH, no doubt. But I quit after about 3 months because the game just started feeling too repetitive/grindy. Also I really love exploring and CoH just needs more variety in the environments. And I guess at the end of the day I want loot too.

They are starting to get that, with a good bit of little changes in instanced missions. Things like trap doors, being captured if you die on the mission, some new environments, etc. The base is good, but yes, at release, it lacked variety.

The fact they are dropping in at least 1 new zone per issue shows they know this, and are trying to remedy it. It goes back to that old not enough content for all players thing.

I can guarantee that if you came back in 3 months (after issue 4), it would be a substantially different game; which I suppose is what you want in an MMOG, or at the least, the best you can expect.

I'm sorry but that has got to be one of the silliest things I've read on this site. To say Tanker's gameplay experience replicates a Controllers gameplay experience is nonsence. And Crafting? Has anyone implemented 'crafting' in such a way it did't drain your will to live?

First, I'm glad to see that NCSoft has maintained at least 100k subs.  It's a good game. They dared to try something different at a time when other houses were sticking with a safe formula.  Combine that with their rate of content additions and fixes and they deserve nothing but respect.  Though I didn't stay with the game myself, I do see this title as a catalyst for getting the genre out of its current rut.

DAoC: Since I'm one of the 3 people that still plays the game, I'll say that 30-33% drop in subscriptions seems reasonable.  I think that server clustering combined with some of the issues with WoW will bring a few people back, but they won't stay long (wrote about this on another thread).

What interests me would be the profit per subscriber for each of the active titles with over 100k subscriptions.  If companies could develop profitable niche games (i.e. higher than average profit/subscriber), then we may expect more titles like these in the future.  It seems that the dilution of games to create mass appeal is one of the factors killing mmog's for me.

They sold 190k of boxes at the end of June of the last year. That they are losing subscribers is a fact, that this may be bad we cannot know.

I played CoH for three months.  Not only that but I played right up until the last day o fmy subscription.  I will resub sometime in the future, definately for CoV if not earlier.

Compared to EQ2, WOW, FFXI, Guild Wars, DAoC, etc... it's the best game I've played because I didn't last out thre free month in most of those games and have no intention of re-upping (or upping in the first place with guild wars) to any of them.

I'm sorry, what?

SirBruce charts seem more and more out of contact with the reality.

He gives WoW at 40k more than EQ2. If you check the box sales of both you'll see that EQ2 DISAPPEARS from the top 10 after the last week of November.

WoW remained between the first three (along with HL2 and The Sims 2) till the last week.

EQ2 subscribers are also tricked by the all access pass, while WoW has also had 100k of contemporary log ins in Korea. To be added to the 600k of boxes (and a minimum of 500k of increasing subs) of the NA release.

I want to live in HRose's world.

Yes - I think this is a great point.  WoW incrementally improved - but CoH is making qualitative departures.

I would love to be a fly on the wall and hear what product Cryptic might consider next.

So what is break even here - any idea?  Did CoH recover its initial investment on box sales?

Just to clarify. NCSoft/Cryptic actually said CoH had 180K subscribers early on.  They probably peaked at that or maybe as high as 200K briefly.

Having said that, I have no idea what Cryptic's financial condition is like, so it's quite possible anything over 100K is good for them.  But I think from NCSoft's perspective, they obviously want games that do much better than that.  So they must be concerned with the falling numbers, even if the game is still profitable.

Bruce

You are the reason MMOG's suck.

Controlling weather, super jumping, and stopping a hoard of anarchist cyborgs from destroying a nuclear reactor are boring, but camping the foozle for a +3 sword of the catass=interactive goodness!

You get the game you deserve, I guess.

What "item-lovers" (who deride CoH for the lack of them) desperately try to ignore is that items only serve as extra leveling treadmills. Not only do you get to level your character, you also get to "level" (by crafting, looting or buying) your equipment.

The complexity brought on by equipment systems add to the complexity of the game, including balancing issues. CoH is shallow, yes, but unlike the games that cover up their shallow treadmills with trinkets (the items, and related crafting subgames), it's up front about it: Plot is more important to it than mechanics.

Comparing CoH to most other stat-heavy, item-oriented games is like comparing Chaosium's Prince Valiant RPG (two stats plus skills, toss coins as randomizer) to, say, AD&D 2nd edition (multiple independent systems, toss a mass of different-numbered dice as randomizer - provided you can deduce that "2-5" means 1d4+1).

Simplicity means stability and gameplay focus. It also means you can add features as you go, instead of trying to launch with a million features, none of which you have managed to playtest or balance properly.

(People still play chess, even though they could try and wrap their brains around full-scale World War 2 strategy boardgames like Europa or World in Flames instead.)

CoH is (almost) alone in providing this simplicity - at least of such a size. It should be interesting to see what the improved visibility of Puzzle Pirates (another simple MMOG) has - that's the real competitor, not WoW or EQ2.

The fact of the matter is, CoH is far too shallow, and only those who like the shiny and are obsessed with z-axis will find it interesting.  It is the ultimate 'shiny new' game:  It presents even less than most earlier games, but instead lets you imagine you are a superhero.  For me, I can't get into that:  I realize I'm just killing foozles to level at about level 8, and the game just becomes a crappier version of every other MMORPG.

Wow, how condescending.  Thanks for sticking to the facts.  

Meanwhile the deep, intelligent players continue to run into caves to rob swords from orcs in exchange for gold, so they can buy some metal pants.

Not much of a rebuttal. Tell me how this game is better than any other MMORPG other than what I stated.   It's just a MMORPG with less.  I can't understand how this possibly could be a good thing in the long term.

It is a fact that CoH is an MMORPG stripped down to the bare minimum with more shiny stuff than usual.  This shallowness will account for much of the player loss, not just WoW and EQ2.  CoH was losing players before those games came out due to this.

That's right - anyone who has posted an interest in this game does so based on entirely on z-axis movement.

When you get a chance - read some posts.

No particular order:

CoH has the best combat system of any MMOG I've played.

CoH does the best job of allowing characters of different levels to play together.

CoH doesn't make you kill rats at level 1.

CoH has the best implementation of instancing I've seen.

CoH is solo-friendly.

CoH has the flatest "fun-curve" from level 1 to 50, while still motivating players to level up.

CoH relegates loot to the proper level of semi-importance.

CoH is virtually bug-free, and patches work when they come out.

CoH patches add new zones, missions, and  the last one added new archetypes.

CoH character building (not the looks, but the powers building) is incredibly deep.

CoH has great events (Halloween, Winter Lords, Ghost Ship, Giant Squid, etc.)


What doesn't it have?  Crafting and elves.  I guess we're all just shallow.

So there.  Did you spontaneously convert to a CoH subscriber?  Yeah I didn't think so.  What was the point of this again?

(My post is only referring to the under level 20 game, as I could never stand to level higher to get to the 'good stuff'.  However, if CoH as you said has "the flatest 'fun-curve' from level 1 to 50", there was no 'good stuff'.)

Your style of post lends itself well to a subsequent Sirbrucing, but I'll refrain and make my reply a bit more concise than that sort of thing:  The combat is tedious and boring, offering nothing new whatsoever, and actually taking some steps backwards as far as concise stategy goes, becoming more of an action game.  This could have been ok, if it were deep and took some skill (which it didn't in my experience).  All the game has is combat, and yet it isn't really better than most other MMORPGS out there.  As far as not killing rats?  Hah.  You might as well be.  How many uninispired bland instances do you have to run through killing boring NPCs before you get sick of it?  The early-game instancing is pathetic.

The character building may be deep, but takes hideously long to get to that point.  I got three characters up to level 15, and none of them were interesting at all.  They might have been interesting at level 40, but the game was just a damn grind, on the same scale as EQ without an interesting world to back it up, so why should I go through x amount of crap to get to the so-called fun part of the game where I actually have some interesting abilities?

Of course I'm not arguing that people can't have fun with this game.  But I am arguing that most MMORPG veterans will see through much of it and find it shallow.  The declining subs reflect that.  The only thing really brilliant CoH did was Sidekicking, which really should be implemented in some form in most of the EQ-clone games.

Oh, and I'm really just cranky because you brilliant people praised the game so much before it came out that I actually bought it at release.

What a fucking waste of 50 dollars.  My bad though, I won't trust the hype ever again, even on these jaded sites ;)

I beg to differ.  You can make a pretty good elf with the pointed ears they offer.

Question:

What makes a zone interesting?

What makes a power interesting?

You say that none of these were "interesting" to you.  I certainly never had that problem.  What didn't they do that they should have done?  I mean, every single attack power in the game has some sort of secondary effect, and most of these can be coordinated and stacked to be quite effective.  So it's not like the power progression is just "same thing, more damage, same thing, more damage, same thing, more damage" like other MMOGs.  Then there are powers that are pure utility, even betting on intangibilities like enemy location, such as Tar Patch or Hurricane.  These are powers that you get below level 20.  So what missing strategy are you talking about?  Strategy is a huge part of CoH gameplay, and a smart team can face pretty huge odds and come out sparkling.

So why wasn't it interesting?  What was your perception of the game world that made it seem bland to you?  Was it just because it was in a city?

Instancing:  Bland, repititive.  No puzzles to solve, nothing beyond the most simple of EQ style killing.  Plus, you have to go through them basically multiple times, as different missions are all practically the same 4-6 instances, just with a different boss or objective.

The graphics were good usually.  Perez Park was an example graphically of an interesting zone, and probably the zone I enjoyed the most. But the city zones were all boring as hell.  I don't really know how to make a large urban city interesting in an MMORPG.  They definitely didn't do it.  Steel Canyon, Skyway City, Atlas Park, all city zones just blend together.  A bunch of mobs stand around and wait to die on the streets.  Next level, a bunch of mobs stand around and wait to die on the streets.  And they are the same mobs, just a little higher level.  

Powers:  Not enough of them in the early game.  Came at such a slow rate I got bored with my characters.  None of the cool ones are in the early game.  The coolest power I ever got was Gust (I think it was called).  And that wasn't all that fun by any means, just a way to knock some mobs back from my frail  defender for 3 or 4 seconds.

I guess.  Maybe if they get that archer powerset in for blasters, we could start a SG of Night Elf hunters ftw.

I can think of a low level trial off the top of my head that disproves that.  It's called the Cavern of Trascendence, and I think you have to be level 12 to do it.  You need a group of 8 people, and it's in the tunnels in the Hollows.  After you've managed to clear the front rooms, you can explore each of the 9 passageways.  One ends with a stone door that seals the path, the others each end with an altar.  Each of the 8 team members goes to an altar and all touch it within the same 5-10 second window.  The door opens and leads the way to the Monster within.  Players receive the Transcendent badge for finishing this mission.



I don't know how to respond to that last sentence.  Maybe you played before they changed how trolls and outcasts work.  But I can assure you, fighting Trolls or Outcasts at levels 5-15 is nothing like fighting Skulls or Hellions at levels 1-10.  Similarly, fighting the Tsoo is quite a bit trickier than fighting the Outcasts.  When you get all the way up to the higher levels with groups like the Carnival of Shadows, it's pretty ridiculous to say that all the villains are alike.

I guess you can argue that the zones look alike.  I really don't think they do, what with the huge highways all over Skyway City and its claustrophobic feel compared to the wide open spaces and largely flat, newbie friendly Atlas Park.  Giant status like Atlas don't do it for you, I guess.  I don't know what to say to that.  You want visually impressive stuff, but not what they have.



Cool is just another word for interesting.  You still didn't really explain why some powers are cool and some aren't.  Personally, I like that the bread and butter powers are available at low levels.  I think Energy Torrent is a very cool power, and I think that's available at 4 or 6.  I think Air Superiority is a great power, and anyone can get that at level 6.  Same with Hover.  Hell, Hover is something most other MMOGs wouldn't ever offer, or if they did they'd demand that you be some ridiculously high level.  You get it at level 6 in CoH.

What about Impale for the Spines set at level 8?  Lets you hurl a bunch of spines at an enemy, dealing a lot of damage, and immobilizing them so you can catch up and shred them before they get away.  What about Shadow Maul or Slice, also scrapper attacks, that are cone-based and deal pretty respectable damage to multiple foes in close range once you get the hang of it?  What about Psionic Lance, an extremely long range snipe attack that becomes available at, I think, level 4?  What about Flash, an AE Hold, at level 6 or 8?  Hell, the new ATs get to shapeshift into a flying space-squid thing at level 6, giving them 4 attack powers for that form.

So I'm really not sure what you're looking for.  Cool zones?  I certainly think they're cool.  Cool powers at low levels?  Hell yeah.  Cool missions?  Not as many as there could be, but they're certainly there even at low levels.  Hell, they even added a lot of unique tilesets to low level missions.  If you're a magic based character, your first mission will include a burning building.

The biggest problem I have with CoH is that is takes too fucking long to level at higher levels. I want new powers, dammit, and they don't come fast enough after level 15 or so.  Between 25-30 I hit the wall and I just don't want to play any more, so I have a huge bunch of low and mid level characters that I play when I resub every few months to see what's new.

If Cryptic isn't going to make new and different things for me to do while I'm crawling up the experience ladder, the least they could do is allow me to get to max level fairly quickly, because I would just have started a new character and leveled up again.  As it is I will not resubscribe until the PvP stuff comes out, or the grind gets removed one way or another.

Maybe Cryptic made it all too easy in the beginning and I'm spoiled now.

While I was satisfied I can see that for many your first point has merit:  there could be more zone variety.

Not enough powers early in the game?  What is the benchmark?

Let's keep in mind not only do we choose new powers often in the game (every other level - how often do you want it?) they do not operate on the "Firebolt +1" formula.  Each new power is qualitatively different - not a rehash of a lower level power with just more punch (vs. EQ or EQ2 or WoW).

Some of these powers change gameplay dramatically.  I never create a build with the teleport ability "Teleport Friend".

Let's go back to Schild's earliest comments - if I recall correctly - about CoH on these boards:  CoH may not offer the scope of other games, but what it promised it could do it does extremely well.

That is a great foundation for future expansions.

Back off a second, Llava; you're not going to convince him.

That's because of... heh. Well, I hesitate to call it a strength because it's led in large part to the decline of the subscriber base.

But the big defining feature of CoH from my viewpoint is that there's no there there. It's, like you said, a flat fun curve. So somebody who buys the game and finds out it isn't fun doesn't have anything to keep him subscribed for three weeks/months/years until his character reaches the point that opens the door to a new game mechanic that could, possibly, be fun.

What you find fun is a part of who you are. I'm sorry you didn't like CoH, trias, and I hope you didn't shell out for a year in advance or something crazy-expensive like that.

--GF

Well, if you're between 25-30 you could schlep on over to Striga Isle, snag a wedding ring that jacks up your resistance to damage, mow down zombies with holy shotgun shells, and get your very own pet warwolf.

From what I've seen of the place it's Temp Power City. Er, Island.

--GF

Oh I'm not trying to convince him that he likes the game after all.  I'm just trying to illustrate that his feelings of "shallowness" about CoH are ultimately flawed, and he just plain doesn't like the game as a matter of personal taste.  Same reason I don't like WoW.  It's nothing tangible, really.  I think it's a good game.  It's just not for me.

But here he's trying to say that it's just flat out a bad game, and that's just plain wrong.  So I'm trying to give him a little perspective.

Hear hear.

This is what made the Winter Lord event fun, to me. I was able to take a number of characters and level them up past 10 quickly. I got to try out a number of new power sets I'd never tried before.

No MMORPG has really found a way to make ongoing content that is unique enough to be the equivalent of a weekly serialized story or TV show -- the kind of thing that keeps you coming back to find out "what happens next". And none have really found a way to make the combat system , in and of itself, fun enough to keep most people coming back week after week.

- shooters tend to draw repeat visits due to the mod community (i.e. lots of different people making lots of new content -- usually in the form of levels and graphics) -- if you couldn't get mods for such a game, how many times would you really want to play?

- pvp extends the life of a game -- take any combat/action game, such as Halo. How many times would you really want to play the first few chapters?
Fighting other players in the same arena maps, though, draws repeat visits due to the unpredictability of other players.

In retrospect, the storylines of early CoH are just not different enough from one another to make them really interesting. Why did every story arc have to involve the SAME locations and basic gameplay elements over and over? Even the first Task Force mission -- which I thought would have really been an unique experience -- was just MORE OF THE SAME!!!

I love a lot of things about CoH. But I do not love the amount of time it takes to move through the game.

I love a lot of the visuals in CoH. But they skimped on a few elements when it came to making each city zone (not hazard zone) truly unique. The same buildings in different places, the same signs and billboards and the same NPCs wandering in the same way passing the same cars and the same contruction workers carrying the same wooden beams. At least some attempt was made in Striga -- I caught some warriors actually unloading cannisters and boxes on a dock.

Outdoor instanced zones should be liberally mixed in with indoor zones and base maps -- and couldn't they have even come up with some variations on the circle of thorn caves and the vazhilok sewers? They had so many good elements yet the level design was ultra-repetitive.

After nearly a year in the game (beta'd from Feb of last year and am still subbed), I recently got to see for the first time an outdoor map that used multi-storey power plant. I loved it. We knocked guys off the upper level gantries and had a blast running around that place -- I just bemoan that it will probably soon become one of the all-too-common maps, much as the cool laboratory map has now become just another ho-hum monster mowing fest.

Despite all my griping, I still log into CoH and I still play it because flying around or superjumping around and killing stuff for an hour often beats the pants off the kind of stuff I could do in an hour in most other MMORPGs.

Exactly, and it sure seems to me that some variety could have been added as one progresses in the game.  Instead of making the game more fun the farther you get into it, Cryptic has done the opposite.

People in the game just today were complaining that since the Winter Lord event ended their friends had stopped playing, because of the level grind. I'm not surprised.

God.

Cryptic's _adding_ variety.

Right now, and with every succeeding patch.

Dr. Vazhilok now lives inside of a sewer kitted out with mad science gear, enough Tesla coils and Jacob's Ladders to bring a tear to Dr. Frankenstein's eye. The Clockwork King (which is the _second_ task force, Positron's needs some serious work) sits atop a giant metal throne with whirring gears and clockfaces all over the place, and suspended throughout his lair are hollow gears with half-built Clockwork inside. Lou's Garage is an actual garage, with cars up on hydraulic lifts and racks of tires on the shop floor. The Banished Pantheon kit out abandoned mines with tiki masks and the whole place is covered in Obligatory Horror Game Fog. Moving up a couple dozen levels, the Carnies hold glowstick raves, with colored spotlights and dark corners that light up when their energy rings/swords come out to play, and Tyrant has gotten a sprawling evil palace with statues of fallen heroes.

The giant octopus, the ghost ship, the striking dockworkers in Independence Port. The patrols around the Council base on Striga Island, and the Banished Pantheon digging up new recruits in the graveyard.

The new mission maps don't make the patch notes. The events occurring in the various city zones might or might not - hearing the workers chatter about the arenas being built or the portal on Peregrine Island was a total surprise.

Cryptic's added stuff already to make city zones and mission instances more unique, and by all accounts they're planning to do so in future patches as well.

I don't know where anybody's getting this concept of "level grind" from. There's too much to do for any of my toons. I keep having to die deliberately and avoid taking out any unnecessary hostiles, just to finish off my existing mission chains before I outlevel my contacts.

--GF

They never fixed outlevelling contacts?

This is why I stopped playing the game.

Bruce

I think most of the gripes about how long it takes to level have one common thread; they all come from people who've rarely gotten past 20.

In a nutshell, you are doing something wrong.  A decent task force group will likely nab you damn near 2 levels.  About 3 weeks of casual play and I've already got an alien up to level 30, just by running my solo missions, grouping frequently, and doing task forces.

It's as shallow a grind as World of Warcraft's is, and that's about as shallow a grind as you're going to get in one of these games.  If you can't seem to progress out of lowbieland you're doing something wrong, folks.

To a degree they have. If a former contact has offered you a storyarc (since you're limited to two at a time) you'll be able to complete that storyarc and get it off your docket, no matter what level you actually are. The mobs will spawn at contact-appropriate levels, though, which can lead to some amusing scenes - like a massive ambush cresting the rise, taking a pot shot at you, realizing you're ten levels up on them, and then running like hell.

Fortunately there are no giant storyarcs with La Familia, because unless they've fixed it there can be a rather nasty bug - see, they normally spawn up to 29. But there's an alternate dimension where everybody in Paragon City is high on Dyne-laced spaghetti and the Family are in control - and since this is part of a storyarc for 45+ level characters, there are Family there at level 45. The engine tries to spawn Family for your level, finds it can't, and then spawns them at the minimum level higher than yours. I got smacked upside the head by this running a Numina task force, but fortunately it was my tanker, who took the beating long enough to get to the police drones and send the interdimensional mafiosi to the Big Zig.

Backtracking for ordinary missions you may have missed, even if they would cough up a badge when they were done, is not currently possible. A system to set yourself at any level you had been in the past is currently in the works, and will fix other nasty issues like exemplar/task force instability.

I was certainly able to get the storyarcs done - that's not why I was rushing. I wanted to completely clear out all my contacts before I moved on, and I wasn't quite able to do that - thus my question about this whole 'level grind' thing I keep hearing about.

--GF

It's not that I can't progress, it's that at some point I don't want to continue doing basically the same thing over and over while the experience bar moves slower and slower.  There's no variety, in the sense that for example, the original EQ has variety, e.g. when I got tired of grinding experience I could craft, or buy and sell in the Bazaar, or challenge someone to duel.  In CoH there is only the one action, beating the crap out of bad guys for the reward of making the next level and getting a new power now and then.  Sure, there's some small variety in missions and bad guys, but there's really nothing else to do in the game except make a few little decisions about where to put your new enhancement slots,  or choose what color and style your cape will be today.
And as far as the lovely cosmetic changes to missions, that's all they are for the most part.  All form and no substance.  No fun puzzles to solve in missions, no unexpected plot twists and turns, no super-villians with exciting AI, nothing but bland, easy, boring baby food.  

Bleh.

Too late for me.  They had their chance and pretty much ignored my complaints, so they can't get me back now by making changes a year after the fact.

Bruce

I love the fact that Cryptic is adding visual variety -- serious cheers. But whacking the mole is not more interesting the 500th time I do it just because they changed the wallpaper.

My group did a mission the other day in a Council base. Our healer dropped and no one had an awaken, not even he. He said he'd simply pop out to the hospital and be back in a minute. We had all forgotten about prisons -- that's where he wound up. It was truly a cool surprise to run across this twist, which we'd all known about for a long time but just never had to worry about. Breaking him out of the dungeon was fun, even though he had no guards and no teleportation powers worked.

I know Cryptic adds content -- for me, this game is about creating and building cool characters and the current rate of XP gain is just too slow to sustain my desire to level more than 1 or 2 characters.



I get my concept of level grind from my experience of following story arc after story arc and seeing very little advancement.

I agree.  I hear of people complain sometimes there are not enough quests and they need to grind to level.  If you die often - this could be a problem.  If you play reasonably well - you never complete all the contact quests before you level (up to level 37 for me).

It's fun from day one?

The problem is, it just went all downhill after that.  Maybe it was the fact that I couldn't find an archetype I liked. Or maybe it was for parts of the game the missions ran dry or became solo unfriendly.  The game just got fucking DULL.  Once you got to the apparent chewey middle, it just tasted like ash.

I still want to like CoH, and I do believe it's still the best MMOG out there...But that being said, the xp change they implemented early after release pretty much ruined it me. I've tried playing since then, but it just doesn't suit my tastes any longer. It's a grind now, and with very little reward to speak of.

Before, when advancement was much more fast, the reward was in the actual experience of playing it. Now, not so much. Before, I could deal with "shallow". I could even enjoy it. But "shallow" AND "tedious"? Sorry, I've got better ways to waste my time.

Some of what I posted is a matter of opinion, especially about the 'coolness' of the game.  So I'll concede that.

But really, the reason I didn't like the game is in some sense beyond all of that analyzation (or it requires a deeper analysis):  The game for me is fun for less than 24 hours of playtime on any character.  Thats as far as I've ever gotten before getting bored out of my mind.  I think this is due to its somewhat narrow perspective, lack of intriguing npc's or zones, lack of reason to grind through it to see anything new.  I just feel the game is like a more shallow EQ, with more actiony combat (that actually gets boring quicker for me).

Its like playing Serious Sam.  Yeah, its fun for 10 hours, but then I don't want to see the damn game again for a year.  So yeah, maybe its fun from day one, but not at day 14.  For me.  Due to its somewhat narrow perspective.

So there's my explination without any intentional phrases or tone of voice built to piss off people who like the game.

(I'm a terrible troll =/)

I consider the missions a grind.  They are utterly devoid of any personality whatsoever (in my experience).  Its just your own private randomly generated hallway to go do the same thing you could have done in the street.  And there's maybe 5 of them, total.  For the 50+ missions you'd have to do to get past 20.

(I'm back!)

Did you play it at release?

Like I said above, when things moved quicker and I got to experience more in a shorter period of time, I thought it was great. Now, at current xp rate, it keeps me within the same zones/power pools for too long that it's easy to get burned out before I'm even started.

They need more work here I agree.  More variety and at a faster pace.  However, pick a MMORPG and compare, since the variety I see:

1.  Rooftop missions.  Did you pick fly?  Climbing stairs can be a pain lol - makes you think about your powers.

2.  Tsoo Warriors.  With ranged combat and teleport at their disposal - you require totally different tactics in fighting these bad guys.

3.  Find X in mission.  Damn easy - if you took invisibility :)  Run through the mission - loot the boxes - done.  Fast.  Again - makes you think about your power choices.

4.  Divide and conqueror.  Just like the B horror film - your mates can separate and go after bad guys individually to speed things up and if things get tight - use Teleport friend to bring a buddy into the area.  Again, makes you think about your powers and how to approach the mission in question.

5.  Find and Kill X.  Find the bad guy and do the fight.  If you go through the mission and clear it hallway by hallway your a poor DnD player :)  If you dawn invisibility and map the place - unimpeded by combat - then you get to the heart of the mission quickly.

There are more, that's just what comes to mind.  

It is classic DnD issues:  rather than ask how interesting the mission is - ask what powers you can bring to bear to finish it more quickly.  In those terms, I think there  is great mission variety.

When I played EQ2 to a 27 as Templar I found every combat the same.  I never had to think about choices I made.  Eq2 has other strengths, but on the topic of the "grind"...

Yup there is room for improvement here - but compared against other games - I find it much more engaging.  Even in groups - no need for the holy trinity of tank/healer/dps necesssarily - different solutions are possible.

I played at release as an Ice/Stone tanker.  I think the problem then was the character.  A couple months later, I played as a storm/dark defender.  It was definitely better, but I think the XP was slower and thus made the game tedious, as you said.  After that character I tried a Claws/DA scrapper, which was pretty fun for 12-16 hours.  But nothing changed in the end.  I think I probably would have liked the storm/dark defender the most out of all of them.

I mainly started the claws/da scrapper just to see if scappers leveled faster than other characters, which I didn't find that they really did.

Hmm.

There's no interstitial advancement.

There are levels, and that's basically it. Enhancements mean a lot with how you slot them, but since they're level-gated you just shell out at the new level and you're back to full effectiveness again.

No craft skills. No equipment where money might make a difference, and no equipment to loot, either.

The only thing that makes you a more powerful hero is more levels.

Okay, now I can see where 'level grind' is coming from.

The thing is - how much of he viability of sidekick/exemplar is because there's no interstitial advancement? You can group with anybody at any level and scale yourself to be as challenged as they are, and you don't have to worry about falling behind on your own alternate forms of advancement because it's all taken care of.

--GF

Interesting post Jpark.  Makes me think that maybe I would have enjoyed the game more had I ever picked fly or invisibility ; ).

I only got to travel powers with one character, and he had super jump (which was definitely fun).  I had teleport Foe with my scrapper, which was fun to use.  Never got to teleport though.  I think I was a half level away.

That's too bad - guess you never experimented enough to get an "uber" build :)

In PvE that can be harder to detect unless it is a hard fight.  In PvP, however...

Shadowbane illustrated this well enough.  A good build alone can compensate for many levels difference between you and your opponent.

If by interstitial advancement you mean non-combat activites - those are coming.  We can judge it when it comes.

Interstitial advancement is advancement that happens "in between". You raise a stat or skill, you get a better piece of equipment, you get money to buy better pieces of equipment, and you become more effective without going up in levels. Enhancement slotting doesn't really fit into this. At level 12 you start filling your powers with DOs. At level 17 you upgrade the DOs. At level 22 you switch to SOs, at 27 you upgrade, and by the time you hit 32 or 37 you can keep your enhancements maxed out all the time.

I agree, there are good builds and not-so-good builds for various situations, but in absolute terms a level 20 with a good build is less powerful than a level 30 with the same good build.

The reason "level grind" shows up in CoH is because the only way to get better is to rack up more experience points and level. I don't perceive it as a grind, myself. There's always challenging stuff to do, no matter what level you are - but then, I'm a pretty hard-core explorer.

For someone who wants to grow in power, the milestones are very far apart.

--GF

GF - Agreed they have to address interstitial advancement or "non-combat" activities.

I think they are aware of this.  I think we will see the first steps to addressing this in Issue 5.

If you guys want to talk about variety in the game more - check the CoH forum post "CoH combat variety" - I think there are a lot of interesting posts there on tactics in missions.

Now the above posts about the game's shallowness I can agree with.  Personally, it's not a problem for me.  I'm a hardcore achiever type, so the cape, that badge, that next power, that personal aura effect... those are enough to keep me entertained.  I also just plain like the genre- I'm one of those who has to have a full, detailed backstory for every single character or that character is quite simply not fun for me.  CoH lets me write pretty much /any/ weird-ass story I can think of, and there's enough variety in power choices that I can usually live up to the story and explain why the character has the powers he does.  The costume system is, of course, another big part of this.

So like I said before, it mostly comes down to opinion in this case.  You can't really say that CoH is a bad game in the same way that you can't really say that WoW is a bad game.  It's just that it's not right for you.  You CAN say that Lineage 2 is a bad game.  That's fact.  That game isn't right for anyone except for Asians who, by my estimation, are all completely insane.

I was ambivalent here, until I heard someone say something about their group's healer dropping.  Wow, the heal/tank/nuke archetype.  Again.  Color me fucking impressed.  I don't know what the SWG combat system is like, and I hear it blows, but since descriptions of it don't sound exactly like people talking about Everquest five years ago, it wins.

CoH was going to use a skill system, but unfortunately, they pulled out on the idea at the last minute.

Really, how do some of you people do it?  How do you play the tank/nuke/heal game in say... WoW, get sick of it, start playing CoH, and convince yourself it's something different?  We all know everyone keeps remaking EQ over and over these days, but just how many reiterations of the exact same core gameplay have to come down the pipe before you quit giving a crap?

I don't like it over what it could have been, but some traces of the original skill system are still there. It's not exactly a class system in the same sense that EQ and WoW is. Not all "Defender" types (Healer) are exactly true blue healers. Not all Tanks have to be made as meat shields, etc.. Plus, there's a neutral Power Pool of skills that all characters can train in.

That being said, exploration is tied with achievement. The class system is interesting, but it's still the same old leveling game as EQ is.

 
That's what you call a "genre". Nowadays very few games can't be pigeonholed into a clear genre, makes it easier for marketing.

You might be surprised by this, but having EQ-style classes also has some big advantages, like being much easier to balance. Apparently the reason why Cryptic scuttled their skill-based system late in development was that it turned out to be a balancing nightmare.
On top of that classes facilitate transparant and simple-to-implement group mechanics.

In theory, skill-based systems give unlimited character building options. In reality, that just lasts till the players figure out the "uber builds" and when almost everyone runs around as Tank Mage (UO) or Life Mage (AC) you would be far better off with a class based system ...

The same way you can play an fps, get sick of it, but still play another one.

Also the same way you can play any game for 2 years, stop playing it, but then still want to play something from the same genre.

CoH has its share of problems, but its relationship to DikuMUD is not one of them.

People need to seriously look at the way they judge MMOGs as good or bad. Getting bored of a game only after several months of play does not suggest a failed paradigm.

Here's a thing. EQ was a successful product. Lots of people bought it. Lots of people played it voluntarily for a very long time. Lots of people still enjoy it today. The fact that other games build on what EQ did should not, on it's own, be a reason for disliking them.

I no longer play Dune 2 or Civilisation, I got bored of them. This does not imply that Rome: Total War is a terrible game that nobody should ever have made.

On top of all that, CoH is (for a MMOG) a baby step away from tank/mage/heal, the fact that you are not dependant on any of the 5 broad archetypes to able to even start playing *is* a change. The fact that you can design characters of any AT that do things outside of their normal territory and still be effective *is* handled better than it has been before. The approachs to buff/debuff mechanisms, to combat speed and involvement, to having mobs which are suseptible to differing tactics, and to having significant amounts of content added in every patch, are all improvements on what is generally available elsewhere.

There are still mechanisms for taking damage, giving damage, and recovering from damage, but this is true in any combat related game.
 

The mind boggles at the possible abuses that would have come about if they had not segregated the powersets into ATs.  The only character type that I've wanted to play that didn't really fit was a hybrid ranged/melee character.

It seems to me that that's precisely what the Peacebringer archetype is possible of.  My peacebringer is up to level 29 now, and because I've skipped the forms, has about the ranged damage potential of a defender, does just shy of the damage of a scrapper in melee if you concentrate on the two major melee forms, and I have resistances (toggles) again just shy of a scrapper.  Next level I can take seeker drones which are basically a variant on controller pets, with the considerable difference that instead of fighting the bad guys they blow up around them and cause AOE damage.  On top of that I have self heals/HP buffs and a ranged heal.

I feel I've got a pretty effective build going, but I know that there are other builds that I could have gone with just because the Kheldians and their forms have so many power options to build off of.  They're far more skill based archetypes than the other base archetypes are, but with that freedom comes the distinct possibility of gimping your character quite badly, which is a trap that I think a lot of people who decided to dabble in shapeshifting have probably fallen into.

Yeah, I had a question about that. I know that as far as shapeshifting goes you turn squid/lobster and have a limited power selection. How are those powers enhanced? Do you slot out the shapeshift slot and those buffs apply to all powers? Does each new power take as a "slot model" some existing power? Or do you slot each of the four powers of the new form separately - and if so, do you get more slots to do it with or do you have to thin out your future slot distribution to account for the four new powers?

--GF

Also, most blaster builds will let you have both ranged and melee attacks, the problem being your survivability in melee doesn't go up much.

The way it works is you buy your nova form and say for the squid there are 4 powers inherent in that form.  They all start with one slot, and you have to buy additional slots if you want to enhance those additional powers individually.  Nope, we don't get more enhance slots, but even ignoring the forms we still have a wider power selection than the base archetypes.  Add in the forms and it becomes very easy to spread where you slot your enhancements way too thin.

This is an archetype that requires a lot of hard choices to be made, and requires that you not take some powers that sound very cool or else you wind up being much weaker than you should be.  The cool thing, though, is that I can sort of halfass fill in for any role out there that the group may lack.  I've been a primary scrapper, a quasi-tanker, and a backup healer who tosses in ranged damage.  They were wise to make it only for people who've seen the end game, though, because newbies would be screwed with this AT.

Maybe I was doing something "wrong" but I found the mid-twenties to be a terrible grind, which is one of the reasons I quit. It seemed to take forever to get that new power, it just wasn't worth it. I find WoW's leveling to be much more to my liking.

Ditto. I got into my early 20s and advancement just STOPPED. Suddenly killing the same mobs over and over again seemed horrifyingly pointless, and the grind showed through.

You're doing something wrong, because normally you level faster during your lower lvl 20s then during your high teens. My lvl speed only went back to "high-teens" speed after lvl 30.

Thing is, you need to get your build right which smacks a bit of bad power design. Stamina at lvl 20 is crucial and so is hasten for most ATs.

And how often you die.  There are some players who seem to die not just nightly but hourly.  No doubt this makes the "grind" longer.

It really would be nice if Hasten and Stamina weren't such "no-brainer" powers.  I'd definitely be in favor of an increase to base endurance regeneration to allow people to more realistically get along without Stamina.

Regarding the tank/nuke/heal thing.

It's funny you mention that- I was surprised when I started playing CoH just how little you really need healing.  Most of the Defender sets only have 1 heal.  That goes for Kinetics, Dark Miasma, Radiation Emission and Storm Summoning.  Empathy has several heals and is really the "healing" set.  Force Fields offer no heals.  What's really good about the sets is that they offer a great deal of utility in other ways that are quite good at mitigating the need for heals.  Force Fielders, for example, give lots of Defense.  Radiation offers debuffs that increase a team's offensive potential (as well as defensive).  Dark Miasma is focused on debuffs that ruin enemy accuracy, as well as some crowd control abilities.  Storm Summoning is sort of a jack of all trades set, with debuffs, a buff, and control.

But hey, if you want to heal then Empathy is right there.  If you're not a big fan of healing, but you like playing support, you're also set.

I just got Stamina the other day at level 24 with my martial arts/super reflexes scrapper. Even though it's only got one + enhancer in it, I can tell it is a must have power. I'd have gotten it earlier if I'd figured out how much I'd need it. Not having it certainly added to a grindy feeling in the high teens (around 19) and the 20's. The exp. debt is also still way too high for those levels, IMO. Lessen debt and the grind won't feel nearly so grindy.

I'm still subscribed and enjoying it, but I play VERY little each week. I use it as the first real casual MMOG I've played, and it works best that way. I also solo. I haven't grouped since most of the BC folks went away.

That's unfortunate, really.  This game has the best LFG system I've ever seen and a playerbase that is always happy to group because there's really no downside to it.  Most of the time I can't cross a zone going from mission to mission without an invite, and I never have my LFG tag up.  Sure, you'll run into a lot of tards, but just learn to kick 'em or leave the group quickly when you spot 'em.  However, I've run into a lot of decent people as well, and picked up a lot of SG mates that way.

I still like soloing quite a bit, but if you have the time teaming really can be nice.

They've announced plans to have "flashbacks" when you can go back and complete old story arc/badges missions that you may have outleveled. No idea when this will be implemented though.

I think the basic problem is we all define "grind" and "fun" differently.  I tried CoH after a 2 year hiatus from MMOG's, and I found the levelling to be faster than anything I'd seen in the games I'd played.  Mind you, I'm a MMOG freak:  UO, EQ, DAoC, and AO.  In none of those did I ever level as fast as I did in CoH, though perhaps my memory is flawed.  I am also a comic book nut, so bias might play into it too.

I didn't find the 20's to be a grind, as they flew by so fast as to be ludicrous.  My main, an MA/regen scrapper, is 40 and climbing fast after starting last November, plus I have (way too) many alts in their 20's to boot.

Viva la difference, I guess.

Very similar.  I'll play for about a week, make a few levels, then something else gets my attention.  But, it's an easy game to jump back into and play casually.  Even at 30 i can usually pull a mission in about 30-45 mins thus I always feel like Im make progress.  Not a fan of street hunting.  ANd yes, I'm a defender with 1 heal power i never use.  Storm energy plays like a point blank single target nukers.  :)

Xilren

So how many hours have you put into playing? Are we talking catassitude or the 3-4 hours/week some of the rest of us consider 'casual'?

In other words, copying what has come before is easier, because you don't have to try very hard to make it work.


The pure melee paladin, archer paladin, paladin/bard, and paladin/samurai can all be quite powerful in UO.  Then there are the less common paladin/mage and necromancer/paladin, the latter of which makes no sense to me, but which a few people I know swear by.  But hey, it spares the devs having to think of anything if they instead just put a big button at character creation that says "PALADIN" on it.   :roll:

...

I'm sorry, I must have wandered into some bizarre parallel universe where worth is measured by time investment and not by actual utility. I'll just slip out the back door here...

--GF

Windup, if you haven't actually played CoH, you will not understand the differences between archetypes. It may SOUND like typical healer/mage/tank type of combat, but it isn't. All the archtypes feel very different, and I think only the tank and blaster are even close to feeling like ay of the old roles. And there are a number of variations within that. Controller plays like an enchanter in EQ... sort of, but not really. Not to mention that both controllers and defenders can be extremely varied based on the power sets they pick. A storm controller and a fire controller feel VERY different from each other.

If you have played it and didn't see this, you obviously didn't play long enough. I imagine you didn't play long enough because it didn't "trip your trigger." Which is fine, but don't make assinine assertions when you have no idea what you are talking about. Also, stop whoring UO. It had it's moment in the sun, it is not deathly afraid of the sun, for fear that its skin might burn off from exposure.

You may be the only person who talks about UO in the present tense. When we discuss UO, we're talking about the era of Tank Mages, and possibly Dex Monkeys. No paladins, samurai, or other 'class' nonsense that's crapping that game up these days.

The original poster was exactly correct in talking about how people settle (rightly or wrongly) on a single build when given a skill system. I don't mind it, since people actually limit themselves, and you have less to prepare for in pvp, most people will use the same tricks. A more modern but still dated example would be the defense template stackers of SWG.

I have to echo Haemish's comments that CoH's archetype system is the best "class" system ever. There are many, many variations within each archetype. I remember lots of nights when my group of 6 had no tank, no healer and we did just fine. kinetics defenders let scrappers and blasters KICK MAJOR ASS!

Forget Windup -- I'm going to be the resident SB fanboi around here -- THAT's the best class system ever.

/sigh

If only the rest of the game had caught up...

I might actually have to give SB that. I loved the class system.  I loved the disciplines.   Making new alts and working out new templates was a lot of fun.  Like WoW, every class seemed to be fun to play in it's own way and there was a lot of room for diversity.  I actually made a healer and loved it for the first time ever in a MMORPG.

CoH's felt too restrictive.  Some archetypes just weren't fun at all early on.  I think what CoH needed for me is a /level 30 command. 

I suppose I could use SWG for an example of a skill-based MMOG system, but then I'd probably have to play it first, and I'm not dropping the cash on a game that doesn't float my boat just to spare myself hearing you monkeys hoot "OMG UO IS TEH OLD" and make comments that would leave anyone who's only familiar with the last half-decade wonder what bloody game you're talking about.  Tank mages?  I joined just before Trammel opened, and tank mages were already on history's scrap heap back then.  But don't worry, it's somehow my fault that you're blabbing on without a fucking clue, because you know "UO GRAFIX SUXOR LOL" and whatnot.

Now to Haemish, the only respondant who bothered to include an actual point:

If someone has invented a class system that doesn't result in thousands and thousands of exactly six different character types, then good.  It's about time.  In an alternate world where things don't suck, that happened at least five years ago, other developers built off of that improved model, and over time the genre evolved into something notably different than what it was to start.  Back here in the evil goatee-having mirror-version of that universe, I'm afraid the CoH lungfish is going to get eaten by the WoW shark before it can ever pass on its mutant genes, and five years from now anyone who still plays an MMOG will only wish their healer/tank/mage was as customizable as a Diablo 2 character.

Well hopefully, with WoW already out and CoH adding PvP and a new expansion, the chance for WoW to kill off CoH has passed.

I'll go on the record and say "a fantasy MMOG will never kill CoH."

It's just that simple.

My "controller" can (Ice/Empath):

Attack with this Pet
Buff
Heal
Stamina regen aura

Oh ya.... control crowds :)

All this and I have not mentioned the optional power pools:

I body pull using phase shift.

Shadowbane:  Agreed they had the best class system, but nothing else worked.

Exactly.  Some of us are bone fucking tired of fantasy.

I know I am.

I play around 10 hours a week, sometimes more sometimes less.  There've been a few weeks that I didn't log on at all.  Then, I've had a Saturday afternoon or two on which I had nothing to do and so played a really long time.  If that makes me a catass, then call me Mr. Catass.

For most of that time I've been grouped, doing door missions constantly.  Up until recently, I have been soloing around 1/3rd of the time.  I am noticing that as I level, fewer people seem to want to group.  That's the one thing that's threatening to slow me down quite a bit.

As an aside, the single biggest levelling device in CoH is the taskforce.  I've gotten into some really, really skilled taskforce teams (pickup no less!) and gotten between 2 and 3 levels at a shot.  You just don't see that in the other MMOG's I've played, which seem much more focused on slowing players down to a measured, monthly-rate paying pace.

Yeah, X 2 + 17 to the power of 10.

WoW is WoW, and it does what it does well. But what it does is not what CoH does. They tickle different fancies. Sure, there's some crossover, mainly because they are both DikuMud evolutions. But WoW already had its chance to kill CoH, and as the original post in this thread indicated, it hasn't done it yet. Yes, population has dropped, which is to be expected with a game that's 10 months old. But as I said, I think it's got probably twice as many subscribers as it needs to be profitable.

The MMOG market is big enough that there is no "One True Game" anymore, as in the days of UO and EQ. The fact that the genre is now supporting a comic book MMOG, multiple (too many) fantasy MMOG's, and at least one moderately successful Sci-fi MMOG (and two or three not so successful but not failing ones as well) tells me that the only two things that can kill CoH are Cryptic and time.

Might as well keep babbling from a position of ignorance. It makes your posts so much more entertaining.

WHY DON'T YOU PLAY SOME OTHER FUCKING GAMES AND FIND OUT WHAT HAS BEEN "INVENTED"?

I am waiting for a post nuclear MMORPG:  Fallout.  It doesn't exist yet * wishes harder *

It will probably stay strong until the Marvel-licensed MMOG hits in a couple years.  :-)

Actually MMOs arguably can't die of natural causes. They can be killed, of course (see: Earth and Beyond), but Ultima Online is still percolating on years after its launch. WoW/EQ2's launch hit the existing market pretty solidly (including ours (http://www.camelotherald.com/more/1859.shtml)) but the existing market still exists. EQ1 has a new expansion due out, SWG just massively expanded their team, AO is giving away basic access for free, and we're doing some fairly radical things (http://www.camelotherald.com/more/1875.shtml) on our end. Competition is a good thing. It's the mark of a healthy marketplace and makes the competitors all the stronger for it.

I'm mulling over an interesting heresy. Can a "true breakout mass market MMO game" even exist? Arguably, from a technical standpoint, with today's network and database tech, a multi-million user MMO runs the stark danger of being crushed under its own infrastructure's weight. A different paradigm might lie with the (book) publishing industry - after all, a book doesn't need to be purchased by every literate person on the globe to be a best-seller. And not every MMO has to be sold to every internet user to pay the bills. A mature eye to the bottom line in production can allow for a far greater leeway in design freedom as well, which  means More Fun Stuff.

Of course this doesn't help those who view the MMO marketplace as a knife fight, but that view is somewhat inaccurate (http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001-02-12) anyway.

That's the smartest thing you've said in 5 years.

Not in the North American market, IMO. Being that the mass market in NA requires copious amounts of teh shiney, I don't see any team being able to support the content requirements, shiney requirements and server requirements that something like that would require. Lineage 1 (and 2 for that matter) is supported in Asia by the low system requirements and the insanity of PC Bangs. I think WoW's dominance over EQ2 in terms of box sales has at least a small bit to do with the lower system requirements on the former.

Heh, Zombie MMO's.  I like it.

Quick, let me drop fifty bucks on another box of "Kill the Foozle for the Ding!"

Or perhaps not.

Time to get a new gimmick and avatar.

The UO shit is getting stale and your avatar isn't funny (anymore?).

Talking from a position of knowledge is so freaking old.  Assumption is the new knowledge!

I would link to a picture of teh goatse.cx in order to illustrate the area Windup likes to talk from, but I'd like to keep my breakfast down.

Ever so sorry to have besmirched the F13 sacred gaming cow.  Sure it's a pure level grinder with no housing, no crafting, and not even any gankage until they finally push out an expansion...  But it has a somewhat more diverse than normal class system, and it lets you be a SUPARHERO!!!

Wait....our sacred cow?  I thought this was about your cow and your insistance on having strong opinions on cows you've never seen before.

You know what, I never played UO.

BUT IT FUCKING SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Take that.

My game is a broken-down old whore.  But it's damn near the only "not everquest" in town.

That you so consider CoH to be like EQ is Exhibit No. 1 in the case of WindUpAtheist vs. STFU.

So let me get this straight...  Sir Bruce was an inch away from being banned, yet this mongoloid happily walks the earth?

That's fantastic.

Insulting your game is not going to get someone a ban.  Being an annoying troll, possibly.  Then again, I do not have access to the button.

You have no idea the warm feeling I get inside knowing that with the recent influx of even more annoying posters on f13, I'm no longer occupying the bottom rung of the hate ladder.

Bruce

I wouldn't say you've moved any rungs, just that your rung is getting a bit more crowded.

And before this turns into a Bruce thread, CoH is like EQ, if the EQ formula were done in a fun way. It isn't a sacred cow, but it sure is a helluva lot better game than what UO has turned into. Also, some people who actually like playing games, me included, don't feel the exclusion of urban sprawl housing gluts, shittastic RSI-inducing borefest crafting or the lack of being run over by someone with more numbers in their name than vowels makes it a bad game.

No, it isn't UO, and it isn't a virtual world. It doesn't have to be. It just has to be a fun game.

Or to put it less succintly, I've written about this subject before (http://www.f13.net/commentary.php?subaction=showfull&id=1086806829&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&).

EDIT: Because BBCode is hard and whatnot.

Link not working - might want to check that.

Pwned by stupidity.

I've written on this subject before, motherfucker, but apparently forget BBCode everyonce in a while (http://www.f13.net/commentary.php?subaction=showfull&id=1086806829&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&).

That's okay, some of the BBCode is different here than on phpBB.  Discovered that earlier when posting that stuff in the EQ2 forum.

Alkiera

Well it becomes a problem when all those leet endgame-catasses only look for certain uber-builds for raids or instances. Take World of Warcraft for example. If you plan to do the high-level instances like upper blackrock spire, molten core or stratholme you better be a warrior, healer or mage with the respective talent builds or you will have a hard time finding a group. Play a hunter? Nobody will invite you. Druid? Well why should one choose a druid if we could have a warrior and priest instead etc. If you are fortunate enough to have friends who play or are a member of a very good guild you will likely not encounter the problem but for everyone else it is like "do it like us or you are left out" more often than not. So WoW allows for eight different character templates with several talent builds, content however is largely tuned to the standard tank, healer, mage template and this is my main gripe with WoW at the moment.

This also leads to ridiculous tactics in high-level raids. Take Onyxia for example. Standard tactics involve one main tank who has to hold aggro and an insane amount of priests and mages with the occasional warrior or paladin as off-tank for the whelps. This strategy is so mindboggingly stupid but still works rather well because the designers couldn't imagine an encounter involving a different playstyle than just simply getting hit by the boss and healed by dozens of priests while mages spam fireballs.

If you design a game around a certain playstyle don't be surprised when players actually design their characters to cater for that playstyle the rest is just peer pressure. I am glad that CoH tries to do it somewhat differently (hey I am on topic) because it certainly seems like every other mmorpg out there is still too stuck in the d&d mindset.

Jeff

That answers a question I had about WoW - in reference to CoH you might be surprised though.  In the respec (instance) encounter I did around a reactor core - the strategy was different.  We had to defend against hordes to protect an object.  A number of different grouping solutions were possible for this combat as you might imagine - since it is zerg based and an object had to be protected (we used a lot of controllers (enchanters) and a couple of tanks - no dedicated healers).  Further the core could be repaired (healed) but that required someone running to the  other room to get a temporary power to do the repairing / healing of the core.  That meant timing who was going to "leave" the combat and when lol.

It also required spatial awareness.  There were not enough players to cover every quandrant and intercept.  We each had roaming patterns and called out when incoming were detected.

A whole new dynamic imo.

To speak further of the versatility, I've done the respec without a single controller, we had a kinetic defender and a darkness defender doing the lion's share of that work.  Came through smelling like a rose with only one death in the team.

Yep, the respec trial is an amazing example of something CoH has done right, and done differently than other MMO's.  Even arch-villains (the closest thing CoH has to ubermobs or raid-level mobs) vary widely in the tactics needed to beat them.  In fact, I would go so far as to make this somewhat elitist assertion:  the players complaining about the highend game are the players who try to shoehorn the tactics of older MMO's into CoH.

Well, I despise this kind of elitist bullshit, so I don't exactly seek it out. Can't do super instance and get the ring of badassitude unles I deal with some uptight dickwads who take the game way too seriously? Fine by me, so long as the rest of the game is still fun. If that's not the case, well, that's not a big deal either, plenty of games out there to play without dealing with the kind of douchebaggery spawned by the herd mentality that seeks only uber templates or classes that really bloomed with EQ and the unholy trinity. The kind of encounters built for people like that aren't things I enjoy anyway, they tend to remove a lot of the fun. Read an uberguild's raid rules sometime, I want no part of that insanity.

But on the other hand, if you can't find a group, it's pretty easy. Form a group yourself.

I'd say people who can't do high-level instances with 'undesirable' classes are shitty players who need the easy classes to do things.

You, sir, are a freaking genius.  The whole unholy trinity, uberguild, cockblocking crap of EQ is exactly why I will never play another game that has the involvement of Brad "but people like to be victims" McQuaid.  I played a bard to 60 in my catass days.  Never, ever again will I go through that.

So nobody needs to even attempt a good housing system, or mounts and vehicles, or worthwhile crafting, or gameplay that breaks the grind/level/group paradigm.  They just have to make encounters work for more than one type of group, and add spandex.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v490/spaeschke/finger-bush.jpg)

Contrary to the disposition of other posters around here, I think you're OK. And I like UO too. But please...

For the most part, you're not going to define the fun of a game by what is or what isn't on the checklist, relative to an entirely different game. Play it and judge it by it's own merits or shut the fuck up already.

Yes.  Precisely.

Every point but that last has been accomplished in other games already, and that last one is most likely impossible for now.

Windup is fixating on the game concepts and things that he could find in a design doc.  But games are not bullet-point lists of features.  Implementation is huge.  I wasn't interested in CoH at all when it was announced, or in beta, or even when it was released.  Only after it came out, and F13ers started raving, did I even think about it.  When I decided that I liked it, I based that call on the way the game played, not from the presence or absence of a feature.

Without exception, the positive reaction from the crowd was based on the intangibles of the game's feel.  The speed of combat, the enjoyment of character creation, the semi-importance of enhancements (loot), the breadth of character development and builds, the ease of soloing, the time investment per mission or level, the interaction of different archetypes, the ability to interact regardless of level (sidekicking), etc.  If you're not even willing to try it, then you're not going to "get it."  These parameters cannot be measured in a scientific manner or checked off on a list.

People who think that CoH needs housing or crafting or "mounts" (for crissakes, mounts?!) are the ones wielding the cookie-cutter of MMOG design.   The game doesn't need those things, the backstory doesn't call for them.  Throwing them in for the sake of having them would be, dare I say, unimaginitive.

I've been asking for two things since launch, street clothes with appropriate animations (walking around leisurely, etc), and player HQs. Only because I think they are necessary to the Superhero mythos. Not because other MMOGs have them.

Well, I doubt it'd ever happen until the Marvel lawsuit is layed to rest, but I want web slinging/grappling hooks, too.  Of course, my wants are unrealistic, and I'm just happy to take whatever updates they provide every 2-3 months.

Technically, street clothes are do-able with the second (or third or fourth) costume slot. 

CoH are running a 14 day free trial promotion this month btw, you'll be needing a key off of a current subscriber to download the client (current players have all been e-mailed a key to give away). Lots of us here have spare keys, see thread here: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=2140.0 for people you can bug if you want in.

Statesman has claimed that webs are on his list for future powersets/pools.

Street clothes are in game already (though choices are limited), and you can make your character walk if you really don't like getting around quickly.

SG HQs are coming with CoV.

Missing from CoH?

- for God's sake make mission environments something more than just static backdrops -- at the very least let me pick up and throw the crates and boxes and furniture
- when a mission says rescue someone, the person should actually be in danger -- not just cowering in a corner forever. If I don't get rid of the villains, the hostage dies and my standing with citizens and contacts drops.
- when a mission says disarm the bombs or the building will go kaboom, blow it and me up if I fail the mission -- imagine contacts not talking to you until you show you're compentent again (by taking out street trash, for example)
- create missions where I can put together the elements that form clues myself and then figure out where to go next and who to target next -- instead of spoonfeeding me with every single clue and storyline spelled out so completely that I feel like I'm just doing a paint-by-number story
- give me NPCs to care about, protect and defend -- why can't my character have an NPC love-interest of my choosing, or a family member, or friend, who occasionaly gets into trouble?
- give NPCs political game mechanics beyond the concept of faction
- provide other in-game rewards, such as temporarily placing a huge statue of your character in a certain region (until the next hero to accomplish the task comes along).
- even small things could be done -- such as, upon completion of a mission, the game automatically stores a handful of screenshots it took while you were combatting the main villain, giving you a personal 'comic book' of your storyline or the climax of the storyline

Obviously, armchair designing/suggesting is easy; as much as I enjoy CoH though, there are times when I wonder why some things, such as interactive environments (at least for instanced missions) were not implemented. 

See, I've had those moments where I decide UO is old, so I'll go play something newer.  Years ago it was Asheron's call, and that didn't last a week.  Just recently it was World of Warcraft, and at first I was all like "OMG SHINEY!"  Man, it had real graphics, and a huge world, and QUESTS!  UO has a tiny number of shitty quests, but this had bloody tons of them.  So I killed and leveled and quested and grouped, logging into UO only long enough to give most of my stuff away to newbs.

Then, after a month or so, that started getting old and I started looking for other things to do.  In my old game I might screw around just redesigning my house and looking for furniture all night, or waste time training my pet mongbat to kill things, or some other diversion when I didn't feel like playing the "real" game.  But in WoW I wasn't finding any diversions, and if I didn't do my requisite grinding, everyone was going to outlevel me anyway.

So yeah, gimme a design doc with a feature list that makes me pee my pants, because any faith I might have had in the concept of "killing so cool you won't mind that it's all there is" has long since departed.

They have started down this line with doors, destructable objects and objects that buff/debuff passers by. What they don't have any of is movable objects, which is a common weakness of MMOGs generally for reasons of bandwidth and server capacity, including an immobile npc that happens to look like a lab table or a sentry gun is obviously going to be easier than tracking a pile of movable objects of the sort you find in HL2.

Raising the standard at least to an environment with switchable states would be nice though. Flip the switch to turn off the broken gas pipe that is spewing fire into that other room, that sort fo thing.

From the way the skill system has been described so far, this might well be the sort of thing they are aiming for in i5. eg. bring a hacker to turn off the security guns, bring an engineer to shut down the gas pipes, and so on.

Yep -- that would be a great start. Trying not to sound like a GW fanboi, but my experiences in the beta preview PvE content showed that their instanced missions do have things like this -- pick up the seeds to create the vine bridges you need to cross chasms -- collect the parts for a catapult you need to assemble to take out large numbers of foes, etc.

I know that tracking movable objects in the world at large is daunting, but I thought that the beauty of instanced missions was the ability to give the players specific closed environments which then limited the number of updates -- plus, the states don't have to persist beyond the instance, so no need to keep remembering the last state *unless* you tie such a state to a character or group of characters and allow their instanced mission to evolve and change as they affect it.

There was a game in development for a while, Lost Continents (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/lostcontinents/index.html) (think Indiana Jones-style world and missions), which hoped to provide just such persistent-memory instances, basically allowing you to craft your story as you accomplished missions, but then also having to live with the consequences of how you played the mission -- how you treated the natives, which villains you defeated, etc. would be remembered. I think they were a little too early in the tech/experience timeline to pull it off, and my guess is their investors were too nervous to wait for a longer-term payoff (or else their pockets just weren't deep enough).

The Auto Assault devs mentioned having something like persistant instance states in the interview on the front page here.  Where you'd be asked to go someplace in an instance, and then do go there again later, and when you arrive the 2nd time, it'd be in a similar state to the way you left it.

It sounds pretty neat, I admit.

Alkiera

You want something that doesn't even exist in other MMORPGs. Let's be realistic. That's probably because there are some serious technical issues behind doing this.


Timed missio + The game is rated for a certain audience. You don't kill people, you arrest them. There are kids playing.


Respec trial where you have to protect a nuclear core from minions... if you fail, nuclear core explodes... white  flash... But no building destroyed. I guess that if every failed missions caused building destructions, they would be running out of buildings.


You mean missions where you have to read the spoiler while doing it ??
You are talking about experienced MMORPG players who like to run around for hours searching for clues (AC1 is your game if that's what you like)... Most people play CoH to have fun. Tedious search for solutions is not fun... it's called work IRL.


Related to player affected environment. The implications are enormous.


Err, sure. They had that during Winter event. Large groups of mobs from different factions beating on each other in the streets. It was cool. It was farmed. It got newbies killed. It was removed.


Player affecting environment once again. No MMO game provides such mechanism.


You can register demos of your gameplay session and replay them at will. I record some of missions just for the sheer pleasure of rewatching how great those moments are.


My take is that the CoH designers are moving in that direction in a not so distant future. They have made amazing progress in the areas they design. The latest zone added named Striga Isle is really few steps above every other zones in the variety if proposes, the different interaction between mobs, etc... They have plans to revamp every previously existing zone in some similar manners. They are aware that some of them are pretty much redundant and give the impression that the CoH world map is only a city ghetto with buildings of varying sizes.

What others fail to mention regarding something that CoH proposes that others do not is.... large groups of mobs encounters. A group of heroes can be fighting 20+ mobs at once with the proper tactics. This weekend we fought in the respec trial using doorways as a bottleneck to control the flow of mobs. There is true collision checking in CoH between mobs & their environment unlike WoW for example where pretty much everything is ethereal to other moving objects.

Moreover CoH has really meaningful knockbacks. Combat uses a lot more the 3D physical space than any other game.

Finally CoH provides very diverse combinations of powers that sure could be rationalized to healer/tank/damage dealer/mezzer/buffer but are in reality so different that two healers could play in a very different manner. And in that regard CoH is providing much more variety than any other MMORPGs I have played. In comparison, WoW is very bland with its streamlined character progression.

I suggest you take a look at one of the Hero Planner tools (ie : http://joechott.com/coh/) and make an idea of the skills that are proposed. And the effect announced are really meaningful unlike other games. The benefits you provide to a group when "slowing" mobs is really tangible and doesn't last 10s. That's why CoH provide other means to fight big mobs other than "one tank and all healers for the rest".

CoH is pushing the envelope on fun combat and does so by proving that every group is not mandatorily composed of healer+tank+damage dealer. No body dies if mobs can't attack you. Get 3 controllers that will hold everything and you don't need any healing.

Plus sidekicking rulez joo!

d

[multi post is the devil]

I'm not even quite yet at WoW's 'endgame' (designed by ubertards from EQ, of course), but the value of this shines through. I'll be subscribed to CoH years from now, when WoW is a distant memory. CoH was not designed as a "mmorpg" as we've come to know them (EQ, apparently).

See, I'm a hunter aka leper in WoW. I miss CoH where we could just throw a variety of ATs in and use good tactics to overcome the day...the engine allows for that, as you point out. The EQ-style games do not.

I am also playing a Hunter. I just read on the US boards how much non-loving the hunters get and I am disappointed. We'll see how fast they give us some loving.

d

Don't read those boards, filled with negativity and ignorance. Play what's fun and ignore anyone who tells you different, imo. I love playing my hunter. I'm currently taking a break to play an alt, but I'm not taking a break from the hunter. I'm taking a break from the higher level attitudes toward them. People broken and whatnot.

Coming from CoH I found all WoW classes uninteresting to play except for the Hunter and its relationship (love/hate) with his pet. I had played a priest and a warrior in beta and I found those classes lacking gameplay wise... in the sense that it was just stand there and click certain skills. Not really much thinking about placement, environment and other subtleties.

It's the ex-quakeworld player in me. I have to use my twitch skills. Cycle like mad through targets. Throw debuffs the minute they come back up after the anchor is dead. Run at SS. Jump super high. Use knockbacks with intelligent placement to gather mobs around the debuffing anchors. Constantly monitor the health bars of my teammates and run to where they are and throw an aura heal.

So I am playing a Hunter. Not even close to fast pace of CoH but the pet keeps my mind occupied :)

d

And its simply not true. You must be playing a different game then I am - maybe you're alliance ?
Druids are very much wanted in all raids, for their buffs, heals, and in ubrs, for their unique ability to sleep dragonkin. We allways want a rogue or two for damage and cc, some mages for ae and cc, a warlock for ae, cc summons and soulstones , shamans for healing, windfury and wipe recovery- basically the normal raid I go on has one of every class. When numbers were still reasonable I've never seen a hunter denied a raid. And as priest I was NEVER asked about my spec. It wasn't a problem when I was full shadow, and my current weird tri-spec works to.



Onyxia is weird because of the AE, so doing melee damage to her simply is counterproductive because you need to much healing.  Not sure how you would make a single mob pull harder though without this ae. Would have to be some really new design that consider her size, maybe consider her several mobs with different aggro lists targeting dfferent tanks perhaps ?
Note that onyxia is the perfect place for a hunter - ability to do ranged damage, and can feign death to avoid aggro.

Hunters - at least two - are absoiutely required for molten core as well - its not possbile at all to advance past the first boss without them.

There is no such thing as true or not true when talking about experience. In my experience it has been that way. I have been playing Wow since the EU Final Beta (Three Months now) and have seen the aforementioned behavior nearly every day. Hell while playing my gnomish rogue yesterday I was actually turned down twice because they were only looking for the standard setup (plus pally).

I do agree however that things are better when playing horde. Two times already I have contemplated canning my rogue and starting over on the horde side mainly for two reasons:

1. There are far less people playing. On certain days you cannot walk into Ironforge because it lags so much due to the shitload of people there.

2. Most horde players I knew actually played far better and were less stupid than their alliance counterparts

And if I see another Nightelf rogue or hunter I will go on a killing spree.


Then you are a very fortunate player. Two weeks ago a german Guild leader (and very experienced raid leader) explained to me that he will not take rogues, warlocks or hunters on a raid because they are of less use due to their "hybridness" than a warrior, mage or priest. He especially described paladins as "useles".

And he not only told me so in private but postet his "suggestions" on a german message board. Well he might just be stupid but people will listen to him because he has such notoriety and his tactics even work because his guild has slain Onyxia. Hard to argue against that.


If you design eight different character classes than it is your obligation to design group/raid content so that every one of those character classes can contribute to it. All I see at the moment is hunters, rogues and warlocks whining on message boards that nobody invites them to instances anymore. And in my personal experience it is that way.

Jeff

Those germans are weird ! Good that they have been prevented from playing on our US servers !  :-P

I think the design of the classes is quite good in WoW - all of them have a usefull role.
The hunter is somewhat less used because he was added so late in beta - all the tactics developed and used during that time simply could not include him.
Rogues are simply the best damage dealer, I dont see how you would take more warriors instead for a raid ? Of course, its a problem that there are to many of them - the best class design cant deal with a badly balanced player class selection.
Warlocks whining I don't get at all, there's so few high level warlocks around I'm allways happy to team with one.

I only see a potential problem in lower-level instances like zul, temple, maraudon or brd that are traditionally never raided - a 5 person groups that has to select from 8 classes is quite restricted in choices. But once you go into the tradional 10-15 people raid for ubrs, stratholme or scholomance thats history.

I actually went back to CoH after WOW. I forgot my old username/pass so I had to rebuy it.

It's still fun.