f13.net

http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/news/news_archive/thank_you.php


I'm rather speechless...I thought this still had a good following.

So yep, Paragon is being closed by NCSoft and CoX is going to be shut down (http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/news/news_archive/thank_you.php).

It's pretty sad, IMO. CoX was a game that had loads of potential and just didn't stick. Still the best super hero MMO by far.

Wow, that's sad. I'll need to fire it back up and make some videos of my characters so I'll have something to remember the game by.

Wow, that's surprising. Pop numbers still seemed pretty good last time I checked in. I guess those people weren't spending much money on F2P stuff.

It's kind of shameful that Paragon goes down before Cryptic. CoX is easily in my top 5 MMOs ever, and blows away anything Cryptic ever did post-split.

 :cry2:

I'm surprised too. I thought this game was doing at least OK after the F2P transition?

COH is one of the most innovative games on the market that managed to get so many things Just Right. It's also one of those games that allowed me to relive my MUD zone-building days with the help of the Mission Architect content creation system. Man, that was so freakin' awesome... sigh.


Well... that's that, I guess.  :sad: *pours out a 40*

:cry2:

This was always one of my favorites.  I'm sad.

NC Soft is one of those companies that shuts things down on a fairly regular basis, aren't they?  They shut-down Lineage 1 last year after 10 years.  I expect GW1 will be shuttered in the next year as well.

Found the list of closed games on their wiki page.
Auto Assault            NetDevil            MMO              Closed August 31, 2007.
Dungeon Runners    NCsoft            MMO                    Closed January 1, 2010.
Dragonica                   Gravity Corp.    Casual MMO    Closed July 13, 2011.
Exteel                    NCsoft            TPS                    Closed September 1, 2010.
Point Blank (Korean)    Zepetto            FPS                    Closed July 13, 2011.
Tabula Rasa            Destination    MMO                    Closed February 28, 2009.

I'm actually kinda surprised at how upset I am over this, given that I've hardly played the game for the last couple of years, just popping on now and again to check out new powersets. But it was my first MMO so I guess that gives it a bit more impact. Was there some article lately about NC's latest financials not being all that great? I'm assuming it has something to do with it.

That's just horrible. It's a great game and an incredible dev team.

I personally think they botched the conversion by going with what was too much of a "free to pay" model, but I can't believe it's not profitable to keep it alive.

Noooooooo!

So many good memories, and a game I always felt like I could put more time into even after all catassing I did for purples.

Now I'll never get around to getting 1000 badges. :cry2:

Maybe someone will buy it?  Maybe?   :cry2:

That's unexpected. Was the micro-transaction model such that you never actually needed to pay them for anything?

Definitely not, if anything it was more the opposite, you could hardly do anything without paying.

This is the game that renewed my hope for the MMO genre.  It wasn't trying to be anything but fun.  Character creation was fun, travel was fun, and pummeling piles of bad guys was fun.  

I feel like I lost an old friend.   :cry:

They were making great progress in adding more and more variety, more powers, more stuff to do at the end game, and lots of quality of life stuffs.  I blame Cryptic for being a bunch of dicks from the get-go in trying to make Everquest-in-tights, and trying to hide too much of the game mechanics under the rug and leaving players wanting to play more effectively in the dark.

Like most have said, we moved on to newer things.  But this game was kinda of a breakout from the standard MMO mold we were accustomed to at the time, and it will be missed.

If you didn't pay you got (I believe), 2 character slots, no access to inventions, and then a bunch of random stuff like the architect/mastermind & controller classes/various powersets may or may not have been disabled depending on how long you had been a subscriber and if you had bought Going Rogue.

I found it basically similar to LOTRO - you could muddle through if you really really liked the game and were poor, but it was much more convenient to pay.

Regarding the first bit, what the fuck? Nothing was ever Everquest-y about this game, at all. Regarding the second, that explains people leaving maybe for the first couple months when it first released. The situation now, not so much. The numbers have all been available for years upon years.

So they're the barstards who shutdown Exsteel. I liked that game.

Man, this is depressing. CoX was one of my favorite MMOs.  :heartbreak:

Holy shit, this is terrible!  :cry2:  Easily one of my favorite MMOs ever.  So different and innovative for its time, and so much fun.  The one fatal flaw of the game is the game engine was just too narrowly focused for nothing but combat.  A sad, sad day.   :heartbreak: :cry:

Echoing many others, I'm pretty torn up over this, and shocked by how sudden it was. Even though I haven't touched it in years and thought the F2P implementation was pretty bad, CoH was probably my favorite MMO. The only game I've played for longer was WoW.

Also, statement by NCSoft:


I am reading this as "We're getting out of the Western games market, for real this time." I expect WildStar to be on the thinnest of ice.

Surprised they didn't find some other company to sell it to. Even running in maintenance mode, there has to be a lot more that can be wrung out of it.

Oh well. I only tried CoH and CO last year for the first time, but CO's combat felt a lot more fun.

From what I've been reading elsewhere, apparently CoH was still actually pulling in a profit, while other games like Aion were losing upwards of $6 million a quarter.

So I guess the solution is to shut down the venerable profit-turner that costs next to nothing to maintain?

Paragon Studios was also working on a new game so the net (CoX revenue - new game production costs) may have been costing NCsoft money.

Oh, sad day. I loved that game. Outside of WoW and AC1, that's probably the MMO that I spent the most time actually playing.

Since GW2 just launched, I sort of doubt it.

Sad about the news. It never really did it for me, but I admired the attempt and the style. Character creator was still awesome.

I think for me the biggest thing is that it was the first game I played that rewarded and encouraged group play during leveling content, without requiring it. That was huge. Almost everyone fails at this.

Early COH was probably the most pure, distilled fun I've had in an mmo.

Yea, I didn't have going rogue, so I would have to fork up some cash to play my mastermind again.




CoH was grindy as FUCK, I have no idea if this is still true... but it was the only MMO that I never even got close to level cap.

Wow, that's sad.  I tended to get bored of CoH pretty quick each time I picked it up, but I did tend to go back every once in a while.  And of all the MMORPG's I've played, it's the only one that kinda lived up to the RPG part, cause I've never seen such a sizable population of actual roleplayers anywhere else.  I hope the game gets saved somehow, especially if it's being profitable.  Lot of characters and character ideas of mine were played in and came from that game.  Going to miss being able to go back to them.

I shed a couple of tears at this news and I'm not afraid to admit it. No other MMO has kept me engaged and playing for as long as CoX did, and it was only through enourmous burnout and fatigue that I ever did stop. I have masses of characters spread over three servers that I almost universally love and I doubt there will ever be another MMO community as solid and supportive as CoX garnered. I have nothing but the best feelings when I think back on my time playing it; I acknowledge it had its fair share of bugs, flaws and design snafus, but they didn't matter. A wonderful, colourful, kinetic game and thanks to the Virtue server, some of the best random moments of MMO fun and actual roleplaying I've ever experienced. I actually feel a little damaged, now. Like something genuinely important is being taken away from me. I thought it was still in profit...? Wtf, NCSoft. Wtf.

I am just really BS because of what I have heard of Paragon's development. I was a big fan of the COHpodcast and at one point before CO split off, they were down to really running a game and doing just fantastic stuff with I think it was 8 people. "Oh you like the revamp of that zone, that was this person and they did it all."

They deserve better. Honestly, this makes me sad I bought GW2. I just don't want to give NC any more money.

Me too. But the actual play of the game was so very fun. It also was ahead of it's time for things like teleporting players right to you, super-fast travel, liberal instantiation to reduce public-space social problems, quest hubs with clear direction to the next one, map markers, and a system that balanced the player against 3-5+ NPCs rather than the more traditional 1v1 methods of the day (which made you feel heroic).

Their early lead dev did have a be-like-EQ mentality with the XP curves and data obfuscation. I remember hitting the brick wall of advancement pretty quickly on all characters. This made the game super awesome for me from 1-14. After that it slowed to a crawl. I'm not really about "time to next level" as much as "time to the next ability or different kinds of fights".

For its day, they were quite innovative. And some of their better ideas are only now becoming commonplace. I am glad to see they've lasted for so long.

Rather than regurgitate, I'll cut & paste (& polish) what I said on Facebook:

I've never been a superhero fan. Even as a six year-old, I found the idea of men in tights punching each other to solve the world's problems silly and unbelievable. So City of Heroes was a game I didn't care about... until I tried it, at GDC 2004. Playing the tutorial once was enough to persuade me to preorder it, and I subbed for a total of five years.

CoH did many things right. It was my first skill cooldown based combat system in a genre that until that point ran combat in MUD-like, latency-friendly rounds. It made travel fun. It had a character customization system that even today stands out for its power and flexibility. It was the first game I played that granted achievement-based titles for combat, exploration, and other activities. It invented the brilliant sidekick/exemplar system. It invented the even more brilliant (but oddly less-appreciated)
giant monster combat code. In a time when statted character equipment and crafting systems were considered de rigeur, it tossed both out... and was good enough that no one really cared.

We've lost other games in recent years. I've lamented some of them. Aside from SWG, this is the first one that I truly think will lessen the industry when it passes.

Paragon and Cryptic Studios, you did fine work on this game. I salute every one of you. I'll miss your work.

Always one of the things I point to when talking about dynamic or level-scaling mobs.  I guess most don't understand why this is just so awesome to us.

Well, to be fair it is also quite a bit more complicated to implement something like this in games with stats, spell ranks, gear, etc. Same for sidekicking, etc. CoH is just way more mechanically suited to scaling people up and down.

W.  T.  F.

That is pretty much all I can say.  Out of all the MMO games out there, there must be half a dozen that probably deserve to die a lot more then CoX.

Anyone know if anybody has ever looked into Emulated Servers for this?  Even though I have only played it for a tiny bit since it went FTP, I would hate to lose it completely.

That's sad, I liked CoH a lot (still have money on the account) and always meant to get a character to cap. It was old, and an abandoned child for much of it's history, but there was still a lot of goodness in there.

CoX has the distinction of being the first MMO that I ever played a character to max level on.

And the only MMO where character creation was so cool that I took screenshots.  Two from 2004 of my blapper, Mintergy.


And after I got my aura:


Copying it from the laptop (where I kept it for boring business trips) to the PC for some nostalgia while it lasts.

I played CoX on and off. Never got to max level, but enjoyed it. I'd resub every once in awhile to make new characters, goof around, and feel...heroic.

Sad to see it go. Thankfully I have a ton of screenshots of my various characters -- although my brother's, curse him, always had better names.

They did an awful lot right -- and I'm not sure that a lot of the "done right" stuff ever really propegated to the MMORPG genre as a whole. Sidekicking and exemplaring was brilliant, for one.

Damn, I was actually considering picking it up again in a few weeks.

CoH was really my first MMO. I'd played DAoC before it, but not for a significant amount of time.

I haven't touched it in 6+ years, but I'm still sad to see it go. Tempted to reinstall and give my old character one last spin.

CoH was my first real MMO as well; I'd tinkered around in both EQ and SWG for ~a week each but CoH was the first one that stuck. Really sad to see it go; I fired it up every year or so for a few days to go smash some baddies.

CoH/V was my MMO, the one that ruined all other MMOs for me. I was playing RIFT, watching my character run slowly up a hill thinking, "In CoH/V, I'd have jumped this".

But...

Look at NCsoft's financials. They are appalling. For the first time I can remember, NCsoft ran at a loss in Q2 2012. CoH/V, despite having a lot of investment into it to turn it F2P, hasn't actually seen an increase in revenue - it continues to dwindle, with a rough 50k - 60k active player equivalents. CoH/V has also shrunk heavily in importance to NCsoft, only providing 2% of its worldwide revenue (at its peak I think it was about 14%).

Plus Nexon has increased its stake in NCsoft, meaning it may be partly behind the axe-wielding.

And then there's the Secret Project Paragon Studios was meant to be working on that it never publicly talked about.

So, although people have said other games "deserve" to die before CoH/V, going F2P didn't see any of those players come back to spend money.

Quite sad. It was my most played mmo. I had many 50s, quite a few of them IO'ed out. I stayed subbed for about six years I think. No one's done character customization better and super jump is still in a class by itself. The powers  and effects still better than anything I've played. No other mmo ever let you feel as powerful. Recklessly charging into groups as as scrapper, or shutting them down as a controller. Fun times.

Everything I've heard/seen says that CoH was still making a net profit, though. No amount of bad financials make it sensible to shut that down, unless you're selling it off for cash or something. Which it appears they are not.

On the plus side, I've heard Champions Online sucks less than at launch.

Sad to see it go but not surprised.   Too much competition these days and the game is too dated.

Good evidence that f2p is not a panacea. If the game is niche in appeal, old in graphics and gameplay (it's too slow moving for modern tastes I think), f2p is probably going to drop your subscription revenue as much or more as you get new cash-shop sales.

It had a lot of interesting mechanics. Scaling door missions to represent a city, lots of nice soft power synergies to make group play fun, and an interesting model for gear. But I don't think it's any surprise that any money it making was just noise, the chance for future revenue increases was limited and NCsoft has better things to focus on. It would be nice if they sold the bones so someone with cash could consider funding CoH2.

It's hard to say - Paragon Studios is saying that CoH/V is making a profit, but that doesn't necessarily say for the studio overall. Paragon Studios second project may have meant the studio overall was costing more than it was earning.

But less important than that was CoH/V being a small title that wasn't going anywhere but down in revenue terms (http://unsubject.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/city-of-heroes-villains-an-end-of-the-world-event/). NCsoft signed off on a box expansion (Going Rogue) and an F2P transition, and whatever costs those entail, only to keep seeing revenue drop.

The decision makes sense if you think of it as an alternate investment - Paragon Studios is (at best right now) only going to hold steady, so NCsoft is looking to put the money into projects that may generate a higher return.

I've never even played it but this hit me hard.

Ah, for the early days when Perez Park was hard to live through.

I feel most sorry for those continuing to sub and play. Like most of the old games, those still faithfully playing are *really* faithful to it. The remaining supergroups still very active have no real place to turn given how special this game is.

Also, their free update Issues may be another reason why they are being closed despite not losing money. They have had one of the best constant update records going, but now it's a liability.

What gets me is just how coldly this has been handled by NCSoft and is the source of most of my frustration with CoH shutting down. I doubt nearly as many people would be as upset if we were just told "The game isn't bringing in enough money to be worth our continued investment in such a limited audience" instead of the vague conspiracy theory-spurring non-reason given, if the dev team was allowed to gracefully sunset the game over the next couple of months instead of being unceremoniously canned an hour before the announcement, and if the game was just opened up for people to come back and say their goodbyes instead of having people whose subs lapsed over the weekend switch to F2P status with most of their characters locked out, or people who bought Paragon Points literally the day before suddenly unable to use them due to the store being closed and unable to be refunded.

People would be upset and angry and depressed, sure, but I doubt that many would feel quite as bitter about the suddenness and lack of empathy.

They may as well just go ahead and turn the servers off Monday if that's how it's going to be.

That would be an element of how little they care about the NA market?

I mean since Aion was the one losing all the money I wondered if it was being shut down in NA. But it looks like they'll keep it going because it has a Korean audience whereas CoH was not.

Yeah this is pretty weak in terms of handling.

Just take a look at the official server forums, let alone all the other usual sites, to see how active they are and how much this is hitting them.

You can count on one hand the old veteran titles that evoke this level of response and dismay if it were to happen to them (or has already): UO, EQ, DAoC, SWG. And for some reason this one seemed like one of the last that would ever get shut down. Like others said, this one hits me harder maybe because it was the first superhero MMO and a break from the up-to-then fantasy themed ones, and like the other MMOs mentioned above it was ground-breaking in many ways when it came out. It's character creation is STILL the best one ever produced.

CoH was always fun to return to from time to time, even when I had to resub, just to fly and superjump around and trigger all the music. It may not have held me constantly, but it did successfully create a world with unique mechanics, zone styles and sound that you were drawn back to over the years. The people on the streets, the familiar instances. And the mobs: the Nazi-esque Fifth Column, the Big-Trouble-in-Little-China oversize paddy hats on those Tsoo, too many to list but they all had their own character. The music queues from many zones are imo only rivaled by classics like old EQ. The login screen theme (the original one), Atlas Park, Steel Canyon, Talos Island, ... RIP.

CoX had the best character creator I'd ever seen, and better than most I've played since.

My daughter spent hours designing costumes on that. I'd like to log in again just to see those.

It's sad that they can't find a way to keep this going, and surprising to me that it's a loser for them. I thought it was doing ok.

Yeah, that's a serious whatthefuck decision, given the fanbase of the game.  I could see them canning major development and just throwing an occasional costume onto the marketplace to keep a profit turning over the cost of running the servers, but pulling the plug completely is just idiotic.  Those people were still customers, money was still coming in through the cash store.

Played this for a few years, and it remains a fantastic counter argument to people who whine about how all classes have to be the same or how it is impossible to make fun support characters so we shouldn't have any.

Noone else has managed to make characters play so differently and so well together without demanding trinity style fixed class mix in a group.

Also sidekicking.

And giant robots.

Funny thing, I would probably pay a few bucks just for the character creator to use offline.  I'd also pay a bit just for the base creator and a way to do that locally, to create environments to share with others.  I suspect they could actually make a bit of money selling parts of this game as standalone applications just to play with.

Never got to see the giant robots.  Just a bunch of instance doors.  Never found the fun. 

CO is pretty fun, and with a whole lot less grinding. I'm sure a lot of them will find their way over there, especially if Cryptic is smart and runs some sort of promotion.

I think Champions, outside of the very basic mechanics of combat and the character creator (which is superior in some ways to CoH's and inferior in others) is largely shit. If former CoH people migrate there, it will be because the only other choice (DCUO) is even worse.

For one thing, the game sees jack-all for content updates. Looking through recent updates, the only things I see are tons of cash shop costume bits, vehicles, and travel power stuff and only one or two minor combat encounters which are randomly spawned in the world. This is since May. A single Issue in CoH likely saw more actual go-out-and-do-stuff content updates than Champions will see in a full year. Why would I want to play a game that's so poorly supported outside of a constant flow of cynical cash grabs (that Cryptic themselves have admitted don't sell)?

Then there's the writing. Never, ever have I seen a game with such universally godawful writing. Normally MMO writing is either excellent or so bland it's completely ignorable. In Champions, it's so aggressively bad that it actively hurts the game. "World of Warcraft has puns and pop culture references right?! And it's more popular than Jesus, yeah?! How about we make every single mission a shitty pun or a pop culture reference, no matter how tired or dated or situationally inappropriate! That's the fucking ticket to gravy town right there!" The mission writing itself is pure schlock. I cannot think of a single mission or mission arc with a standout storyline; there's no Frostfire moments or Striga Isle volcano moments in Champions. The Honoree fight at the end of the Lady Grey Task Force and the storyline surrounding and leading up to it was one of my favorite things in CoH. There is nothing like that in Champions. There are few overarching storylines, no care for weaving a mythos, or even attempting to tie it to the mythos they paid cash goddamned money for. The voice acting is never good, and none of the pointless, horrific in-game cutscenes can be skipped.

The art style isn't awful on its own (though that's subjective as I know a lot of people who detest it), but it ties in with the terrible writing to create another problem: it is impossible to take anything in this game seriously. Everything is so damned campy. All the time. To paraphrase someone elsewhere, "City of Heroes is more like 616 Marvel, Champions is Adam West's Batman." Camp is fine, but when everything is camp all the time it becomes nigh-impossible to craft a storyline that anyone will care about. City of Heroes had dark, heavy moments but it also had light-hearted camp and everything in between. In Champions, everything feels so light-hearted and inconsequential that I can never even begin to care about what happens to these worthless assholes in nu-Detroit, never mind my own character. When I can't even begin to care about my own character in an MMO from a storyline perspective, all that leaves is gameplay, and Champions comes up sorely lacking.

CoH people will migrate over to Champions, to DCUO, but most probably won't like it. A few will find CO's punchy play fun enough, others will carve out a corner in the not-Pocket D, and some will even buy Cryptic's overpriced cash shop crap, but CO will probably never get any better.

A lot of CoH players have always said this, but it's basically just the narcissism of small differences, a series of relatively minor differences that fanboys of one property or the other get worked up about. But when faced with a limited range of options, most CoH players who aren't burnt out on superhero MMOs entirely will largely find they can scratch the same itch with CO. The common thread in all of the differences you mentioned hating about CO is how trivial they are in the broader swing of things.


Er...

Back in April, there was the largest update in the game's history: http://co.perfectworld.com/about/onalert/onalertmain

And the latest update looks to be pretty substantial, too: http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Champions-Online-Nighthawk-Update-Adds-Vehicles-46381.html

Not to mention the Comic Book story arcs.

But since CoH is getting shut down, and DCUO's update schedule is more along the lines of CO's, perhaps that could be taken as an indication that there isn't enough of a market for these games to justify the staffing necessary to pump out content at the rate that CoH was, and CO's schedule is the "new normal"?

I'm not convinced that COH's players are primarily looking for superheroes, but more of a type of gameplay. A bit more RP, a lot more team based play, and a lot more action. I'm not sure if anything out there really works for that. If anything the super heroes thing hurt rather than helped. I still believe if you took the COH engine, dated as it is, and reskinned it for Norrath or some fantasy world and threw in the usual modern things like an LFD system and raiding, we would all be declaring it a WoW killer.

What Numtini said. I'm a huge fan of CoH but it's despite the super hero setting, not because of it. Flexible grouping, actual roleplay/backstories/character concepts, that badass feeling where it's you versus 10 mobs, stellar character customization, the list goes on and on. The biggest tragedy here is that none of the things CoH got right are being incorporated into any more modern MMO because they didn't earn money hats or get ripped off by WoW.

That might be true for the most vocal superfans who are also long-time MMOers, and I personally enjoy those features too; that said, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the average CoH player likes superheroes and, if they're staying in the MMO space, would gravitate towards a superhero MMO.

Also, as a tangent: for what it's worth, having played CO to cap (played it for about a month) and CoH to significantly under the cap, at every level range I felt I could take on far more monsters in CO, usually eight or nine at a time without much in the way of downtime. My run-of-the-mill CoH character could usually only take on 3 or 4 baddies at a time, less if they were the bigger guys. This was using an archtype rather than freeform character.

GW2 is probably the closest. In the idea of soft roles, relatively flat gear progression and content that scales to group size and levels. Plus dynamics that mean more people are generally more fun (and chaos). But it's not really the same thing because the super-hero genre was a license to have ridiculously overblown mobility and CC mechanics. Super-leap and watching mobs get thrown around will remain some of my fondest memories, and the player made missions were ahead of their time. Also spent so many hours playing in the character designer. But it also suffered from limited and repetitive content and really needing a PC model over-haul which I have heard blamed on it being resource starved while the developers focused on their next big thing (Champions).

Champions was a terrible game when I played it in beta. Dumbed down and button mashy for the console generation, DCUO seemed to have the same goal too.

This is more what I meant about nowhere for them to go.

It's the combination of genre and social gameplay that together you just can't find anymore.

Even if you dismiss the superhero genre part, how many MMOs of any genre still reward socializing and grouping over soloing everything and not bother really knowing anyone else?

I also agree that offline character creation and zone viewer tools would actually sell quite well.

I also expect a serious effort at a server emulator, that up to now has largely been ignored since it was just easier to sub or f2p on the real servers. Legally sanctioned or not (it hasn't affected p99, Dalya, Utgarde or Feenix now has it).

Sorry to say I never played this. Was one of those games on my list of want-to-plays that I never got around to.

I've seen the comment several times that shutting it down while it's still making a profit is senseless or stupid (paraphrasing, don't get panty-bunched if those weren't your exact words). Thing is that if the profit rate is low for a given number of staff then a business would be sensible to move those staff onto a project where they can generate a greater rate of profit. That's just simple business economics, and games aren't some kind of special magic activity that doesn't exist in the same world as every other kind of business.

I also think there's some selective rose-tinting going on in this thread. Yes, CoH sounds like it did lots of things very well, and that's great and it would be good if some of those things were translated to the genre at large. However I've also heard a lot of complaints about various aspects of CoX over the years and forgetting the bad things does nothing to further understanding of why it's no longer as profitable as it needs to be to stay alive.

The big downside was that if you stick to one character the game just gets exponentially grindy. The end game was making more alts and the devs kept adding low and mid level content to support that. If you didn't like making alts you'd get bored and be better off playing eq2, lotro or whatever.

Alternately, the endgame was purpling out your character and seeing how broken you could make yourself. Another regret: I never got around to soloing the ITF on my stalker.

CoH certainly had plenty of shortcomings, but they're easy to forget because they're mostly not particularly unique. Repetitive and clunky combat, a lot of grind around the mid levels, a lacking endgame, shittastically balanced PvP - if I ask ten people to name a game with those features, I can easily get ten different responses. But ask for a game with fantastic costume creation from level 1, hundreds of ways to build your character, natural incentives and few barriers for playing with other people, user-made content, scaling difficulty, no real trinity, little railroading, enemies that you actually grow to care about, and a friendly community to top it all off, and there's really only one option.

It's not Champions Online.

It's not rose-tinting so much as the game offered a package that cannot be easily found elsewhere.

For the time-frame it launched, it also had a good population.  Time has caused it to be eclipsed by newer, flashier games in more popular genres, and the engine was starting to show its age.  It could have continued on like UO with a small and dedicated population indefiniately, but NCSoft tends to kill anything not pulling in big numbers.

I think the big flaws were grind, lack of diversity in random dungeons, and a lack of an end game.

COH was an early favorite of mine, and I played it extensively for a few months with a group of dudes in university. We still fondly recall our old characters, stomping around through Steel Canyon and Perez Park in the early days when simply getting your main travel power was cause for excitement.

The character creator was a huge part of its charm; I think it properly invested you in your character from the start, as opposed to starting off as the same generic stick-wielding schlub who washes up naked on the beach in every other MMO out there. Coming up with silly new superheroes and power combinations was a favorite pastime; I'm still partial to my alts, The Red Book and Supply Side.

(Nerdy admission: All three of my characters had interweaving backstories, written out in the little backstory window you're given for each character. I fondly remember receiving appreciative /tells about my backstories. Long live The Third Shift and his sidekicks, Doctor Hobopolis and Skull Man.)

The early game was definitely the most fun, I think. Properly slotted, a group of 3-4 guys could easily take on a dozen mobs. The late game is where early COH really suffered, with long grind times, long travel times, and enemies that literally sucked the fun out of you (I'm thinking of those level 40+ dudes with the endurance-sapping guns). Most of us dropped out in the 30s, with only two of us making it to 40 and beyond.

The guy who made it past 40 ended up going to work for Paragon and was working on :nda: until NCSoft gave the whole studio the axe.

Any grindiness, at least in terms of leveling speed, was long gone. They had to add a "turn off xp" option to accommodate people who were outleveling story arcs. I think their greatest flaw was the repetitveness of the mission layouts and tilesets. After a few years I'd take a step or into the map and know exactly where everything was. I quit for a few months after having three missions with the same lab tileset with the same layout in a row. Only difference was what enemy group was spawing in the exact same spawn points.  Running up against the raiding endgame of EQ2 and those almost flying carpets brought me back though. Poor Nemesis never got his own steampunk labs.

Not just the character creator, but also the selection of not just a class, then a primary and secondary power within that class, plus the power origins of tech, magic, etc. It really left you with the feeling you were unique in meaningful ways.

I do remember grinding through the 20s/30s and repeatedly thinking "oh fuck, caves again?!"

That tileset was the worst, as it only produced a maze of twisty passages, all alike, such that no minimap could help you find the one last area you hadn't hit to trigger mission completion.

The grind early in the game's life was definitely the worst part about it and was what stunted its growth. The lack of endgame could probably have been excused for a very long time with how much fun it could be to make new unique characters over and over. CoH gave me the alt-itis I have today.

Diversity in mission environments has only gotten better, and I imagine if the Emmert Grind hadn't been around, the extra revenue from more players would've led to more mission tilesets in a timelier fashion.

The normal cave tilesets were relatively small, though (with a couple of exceptions in some special missions), and it was only the "cake" room (with the multiple layers*) that was really a pain. Oranbega was much much worse than the cave tilesets.

* True story, for the longest time I didn't realize there were "ramps" you could use to move up and down the levels. I would jump on the beams to move up :uhrr:

I played a fair bit a few weeks ago for the first time in about two years (and did a one-month VIP sub, sorry, I killed the game) and didn't see a blue cave until about level 25.  I was beginning to wonder if they had been removed at some point.  But no, they were still (rarely) there for your nostalgia/annoyance.  The one I got didn't have the goofy three-level room, though.  But flight at level 4 or whatever makes that much less of an issue.

That reminds me that most of the issues had been really been ironed out over the years.  Movement powers at level 4 now instead of 14 (which later became 6?), the leveling speed seems to have been increased and there was also the DFB option to really zip up to 20 in a jiffy if you wished, and downtime was pretty gone whenever they had given everyone fitness.

Now I'm re-sad.   :cry2:

Vanilla Ice was an option?   :awesome_for_real:

This game never really did it for me, once you got past the character creator.  But damn that was a cool feature when it came out.  I spent hours just getting the right character only to find the play fairly drab.  I still like Champions Online because of the character creation mechanisms. 

I actually made a Ninjas Mastermind named Go Ninja Go Ninja Go.

All his costumes were Vanilla Ice outfits from over the years. Sadly I have no screenshots that I know of.

I'm going to miss this terribly - I had a kinetics/dark defender named Quarbis and it's one of the few games where I had a full backstory and changed his costume over time to reflect story changes.

http://www.creyindustries.com/viewhero.php?id=5341


He was a demon bound into human form by the leader of a friendly corp (Lord Arkady), and after Arkady quit playing, I revamped his costume into something a bit more demonic (the bounds weakening). 

God did I love Kinetics - especially in the early days when I'd nearly crash people's systems after our tanker would herd a billion things together and I'd fulcrum shift it.

After CoH, there is really no excuse to not having flying in any 3D MMOG.  Super Leap was more fun but I can see how that might be harder to adopt lore-wise.

If the FS icons didn't span the width of your screen the Tanker wasn't doing it right :awesome_for_real:

And capes, gotta have the capes too.

Super Leap was the best travel power ever implemented in an MMORPG. Fight mobs or do missions? Screw you, I'm too busy jumping from skyscraper to skyscraper and giggling.

Genre/lore reasons come to mind.

TSW might have an excuse but most don't. Dragons, flying carpets, and/or jetpacks fit easily into almost any MMO out there. I imagine it's more along the lines of wanting to control the flow of players better and the coding issues WoW had prior to the Cata world revamp.

LotRO
TSW
AoC
Pirates of the Burning Sea ( :why_so_serious:)

And then there are games with gameplay elements that flight would break outright - usually puzzle/platforming elements:

GW2
SWTOR
DDO

Flight and super jump and all that stuff was great, but I don't think you could just drop it into any old game and have it work nearly as well.

I'll give you the lore ones, but I'd be fine with being able to spend real money on a flying carpet or something in GW2 (or a jetpack in SWTOR) to bypass the platforming shit. DDO I've never actually played, but not being able to fly in a D&D game just seems weird and wrong.

Well, you're rarely doing open-world type stuff in DDO - there's a lot of indoor climbing of ladders and shooting things that are out of reach to open gates and stuff like that, Zelda shit where flying would break lots of it.

Didn't they just add raids (LFR style even) too?  I stopped paying attention for a couple months.

Flying might be iffy in fantasy settings, but the thing that there is absolutely no fucking excuse for after CoH is launching a game without sidekicking.

Not including sidekicking is just cause for burning any dev house to the fucking ground.

It seems like even people who played the game for years don't realise just how critical sidekicking was to maintaining a grouping culture within CoX.

Also a fantastic LFG system that didn't automatch, but everybody used.

I got pestered CONSTANTLY for groups, outside their LFG system - due to that I can't really draw the conclusion that their LFG system was really serving people's needs, personally.

And even stuff like FFXI that added it in later proved that it's just as viable in more traditional gear-based games as well.

There's no excuse for more games to not have it.

Sidekicking is one of those things that never caught on, because WoW never adopted it.

What's Sidekicking?

Fake edit:

Wow just googled sidekicking it sounds pretty awesome. I guess the fear would be it allows players to just skip content too quickly and then leaves the player to go back and do that content for writing?!  :oh_i_see:

You level so fast in WoW currently that you have to either skip content or do grey quests, so that's a moot point.

It is not a moot point it was a stupid decision in wow just as it is a stupid decision everywhere else.

It is part of an idiotic line of thought which makes devs believe that playing with friends and guild mates is less important to retention than experiencing their shitty content only in the order intended and after being "earned" personally.

Sidekicking would be pointless in WoW except for dungeons anyway. The key thing about sidekicking is you have to make content where it makes sense. CoX instance beat-em-ups are a place where it does, or GW2's global scaling is another example (not that there seems to be any advantage at all to being in a group or not in GW2); WoW-style outside world questing as it exists would not be any better with sidekicking because it makes no sense to group up in the first place.

Except that it's *fun*.

I'm playing STO atm and everything scales to your level. There's minimum level requirements on the episodes (storyline quests) and there's a bunch of 50-only stuff, but everything else adjusts to you.

You can group with your friends, regardless of level, and do pretty much anything you feel like. You can go back to old episodes and re-do them and the NPCs and loot all adjust to your level, and it's just great fun. Removing any and all barriers to grouping with your friends is a good thing. I wish WoW had learned that years ago instead of all-but-enforcing solo levelling to whatever the cap is.

My impression thus far has been that you're a pretty reasonable person, so let me clarify - if you're playing WoW at level 40, and your friend was doing quests at level 20, you wouldn't voluntarily scale yourself down so that you could kill 12 dingoes together without trivializing your friends' content?

(also, people constantly messaging you for groups is how CoH is supposed to work - the tools let you find people who would be suitable for your group but puts you in charge of getting them all together.* You probably could have stopped it by setting yourself to "not looking for team")

*the LFG tool that assembles the team for you was added way late in the game's lifecycle and only works on specific, mostly end-game content.

My comment was in reply to Llyse's; skipping content already happens in WoW so that's no excuse to not include sidekicking. I'm very, very much in favor of sidekicking (and examplaring, because being able to downscale is just as important). The only real issue there would be with WoW is the heavy use of phasing and non-repetitive nature of all the quests; even if you went down to your friend's level, if you've already done the content you literally won't be able to see them or their quest mobs anyway. For things like the dungeon finder though, it would be golden.

I know you were asking Ingmar, but I want to answer anyway.  :why_so_serious:

I would not voluntarily scale myself down for outdoors leveling content, no. Because my level 20 friend doesn't need my help (seriously, leveling in WoW at this point is completely fucking trivial), and if he or she wants company, that is what /g is for. In CoX, on the other hand, my friend may, in fact, need my help, and I do prefer content be interesting for everyone involved. But sidekicking wasn't scaling down anyway. It was scaling your friend up, which is more tempting to me. In CoX, I usually didn't exemplar. I brought an alt instead. But I sidekicked people all the time.

Still, on the whole, sidekicking felt good in CoX, but I don't think it would ever feel good in WoW, outside of dungeons. I don't think it would feel particularly good in SWTOR outside of flashpoints, either. And in GW2, it doesn't matter at all. A side effect of "you don't need to group to help people and get rewarded for it" is me never grouping with anyone.

Quite a few DIKUs have sidekicking/exemplaring. EQ2, AOC.. WAR and SWTOR both try to do bolstering in pvp (which is a weak version of sidekicking). Rift has had exemplaring for a few months now (dungeons, IAs, and general arbitrary "downlevel to X" when out in the world), and it works pretty decently.

e: and yes, exemplaring is VERY important. The lack of any kind of sidekick/exemplar system was what eventually killed LOTRO for my guild, since leveling was so slow + the game was so heavy on group content that you had to do on an even level (to not trivialize it, plus I think a highbie gimps xp for everyone in the group too). When some people in the guild play 1 hour a week and others play 2 hours a day, it's impossible to keep everyone on the same level. So yeah, COH, Rift and GW2 are pretty much all-around awesome in my book.

In EQ2, it was basically just a way to powerlevel. When you went down to someone's level, you were a complete monster and they basically just followed you as you one shotted things. That's not the way to do it.

Things improved markedly when team-based exemplaring was introduced (first in ChampO, then in CoH/V). Provided you had one player on the team at the right level, everyone else was good to go.

The exemplar/sidekick model would have been a vast improvement over what Blizzard did with Cataclysm, which was to trivialize the early content by having people level so quickly that it felt largely pointless.

I would finish a zone even though it was grey just to see the story, but it was less satisfying. I actually didn't enjoy the speedy leveling; I thought it was too speedy.

Edited to add: I can recall some vanilla WoW quests that would have been awesome for sidekick/exemplar (some of the horrible collection quests) but those were removed or fixed by Cata.

Sidekicking in wow wouldn't have been a magic bullet as there is almost no group content. And because abilities had a lot of the fun balanced out of them in service of the god of raiding.

But a room with 300 clockwork robots in it is not difficult to add.

In CoH the real 'content' was working with a new group that had a different power combination in order to smash up a room with 300 freakshow.

The thing is, you give people tools like side kicking to play together and maybe they'll start finding some fun in the leveling process instead of continually pushing you to trivialise it; and maybe your game might just break out of the absurd and unsustainable raiding arms race.

Before I jump into my WALL OF TEXT, I should note that I had increasingly strident and specific notes as time went on in the LFG tool instructing people not to ask me for groups (other than when I actually was LFG). Nothing I put in there ever helped, it was really kind of obnoxious. I am pretty sure very few people ever actually looked at the note. Anyway, moving on, to sidekicking/exemplaring and WoW-like games:

In WoW, no, I probably wouldn't help the hyena hunting friend, as the game currently stands (not least because the odds of him actually needing my help to do anything in WoW's regular world questing are exceedingly small.) Occasionally when someone couldn't find a group for a dungeon and wanted something from it, I'd run him through one, but the dungeon finder system largely solved that issue. There are a few elements that have to be in place for a sidekicking or exemplaring system to actually work well enough for people to use it. For each of them I'll give some thoughts on why they don't work in WoW-likes but worked well in CoH.

Grouping has to actually improve the experience for both players:

In a game like WoW, there is basically only one reason to ever group up; to accomplish content that you can't solo. Part of this issue is due to the fact that grouping is inherently more inconvenient in WoW-quest-model games than soloing is, for a number of reasons: you have to wait around for the other player's AFKs and emergencies, you have to try to get onto the same quest step as your quest partner, and quests very often are more annoying to do grouped than solo. For years environmental clickies and drop quests did not count for everyone, so if you had 4 people doing a 'collect 10 bear asses' quest you had 4x the chance of extending your bear ass hunt as you waited for your one friend who got unlucky to get that last drop. The grouping bonus to XP and the fact that you kill stuff faster does not make up for the fact that you're going to burn through mob spawns faster than they can respawn. There's also basically no overworld group-required content left in WoW. The travel time to join your friend in the newbie area can be very long, depending on where he is. All of these things combine to discourage grouping even at the *same* level in WoW, outside of specific group content like dungeons. And while yes, there is a social aspect that I can't discount, there's not a huge margin of extra social interaction that goes on in a group above and beyond the standard chat systems that most games have.

(SWTOR solved a LOT of these quality of life issues, but it has other problems that would get in the way of a sidekicking system, discussed farther down.)

CoH doesn't have these problems for a number of reasons. In CoH, the content is all instanced and comes in discrete chunks. Both of these things are really important to the sidekicking model. It means for example that content can cleanly scale to the number of people in the group at all times, because you don't have to care about the level 6 guy 20 feet away farming mats or his own bear asses. It means that the content gets more rewarding the more people are in the group. It means that people can drop in or out easily at clean stopping points. CoH also makes it far easier for players to teleport each other around and travel to door mission locations quickly, etc.

On that last one you say, OK, but any game could do what CoH does with travel - but not really. There are good design reasons in some cases not to allow players to port each other around willy-nilly. Any game that makes any attempt to include take-and-hold PVP for example, cannot allow players to travel instantly anywhere they want on the map. Take GW2 WvW; there's a very good reason that instant travel points shut down in keeps when they're under attack. If keep defenders could instantly teleport around the map to defend any objective they wanted the entire model would fall apart.

The rewards structure has to work with the system:

Put another way, a high level player exemplaring down generally has to be given something for his time other than feeling good about himself to make it worth it. In WoW, the rewards structure for high level characters consists basically of endgame gear, money, and tokens to let you buy endgame gear, with some cosmetic stuff like pets occasionally thrown in. And note that players will *always* gravitate en masse to the method that gets them the most reward with the least effort. That makes rewarding players for doing lower level content with the stuff they most want - endgame gear, money, and tokens - very, very dangerous from an economic and game balance standpoint. You either have to take the risk and extra workload of constantly rebalancing leveling content as players find the cheap farm spots, or you have to come up with some kind of alternate reward structure that is good enough to get players to want to participate in the older content instead of spending time advancing their character in the traditional way they're used to - and that's a very tall order. To bring another game into the discussion, this is why Blizzard had to ditch their idea for a 'no progression' Inferno difficulty, where you could just go anywhere in Inferno and get the same rewards. Doing that guarantees that the game will devolve into farming the single thing that gives the best rewards over and over and over again.

CoH's reward structure for most of its existence, on the other hand, was just enhancements and influence. Because there was no end game, and no economy for quite a long time, there was no reason for higher level characters to want or need to focus on end game content - and because grouping is *always* more rewarding than soloing in CoH's model it goes a long way to encouraging people to do it.

Narrative consistency needs to be maintained:

This is where SWTOR loses out, and even WoW suffers from this a bit. Some games have specific narrative arcs, or assume that certain zones happen after other ones in time, and if you play things in the wrong order it all gets very confusing and immersion-breaking. SWTOR, for example, not only has a long character-specific arc that obviously has to be played in the right order to be understood, but the arcs usually tie into and sometimes are even the 'cause' of the events on each planet. And the planet quests in turn inform other later content, etc. SWTOR is constructed, very deliberately, to be played in a specific order. Add to that the possibility of spoilers, which matters to some people (cough cough) and it really drives a stake into desire for cross-level grouping I think. Even in WoW this happens to a little extent; if you played through the Burning Steppes zone quests without doing Redridge Mountains first, you're not going to know who the hell this John J. Keeshan. And yeah the story in WoW is shitty and Metzen-y but there are still a lot of people out there who love it for some reason, so it would act as another drag on use of a system I think. (In this case far more of a drag on people sidekicking up than on people exemplaring down.)

CoH's narrative model, on the other hand, is not novelistic, or cinematic; rather it is based off of comic books, a model that is basically always full of contradictions, retcons, and flashbacks. This makes it far less jarring when you have people jumping around in 'time'. It also tends to lack long story arcs that are dependent on things having happened in prior adventures. You're almost never going to spoil yourself on what Dr. Vahzilok is up to in the sewers by sidekicking up to help your friend stop those Freakshow from standing around in their warehouse punching their hands, because the stories all come in bite sized chunks. Even the longest arcs boil down to maybe a couple pages of text of actual story content - a few lines from the mission giver, a couple taunts from the bad guy, and some clue text. It's a very, very different approach to storytelling, and one that works extremely well for CoH's genre, but it isn't going to work everywhere.

Combat mechanics have to support easy scaling up and down:

This one is pretty self-explanatory. CoH's model of very specific 'you got this power at this level and got this enhancement slot at that level', with no stats or other elements to consider, makes it really easy to scale someone up and down by level. Games with item-derived stats have a *much* harder time doing this and staying balanced. You can do it in games where the actual stats of items are de-emphasized, like GW2, but that's just not the model that WoW uses. And yes, you could I suppose argue that games should just ditch items. There are genre considerations at work though, and the idea of a magic ring or a magic sword that you find and use to kick more ass can be very, very important in fantasy. CoH's powerset model just doesn't model this well at all. I can't find something in game that makes me go "holy shit look at how awesome this is"; all I can do is design it into my character from the beginning. That's a big difference in feel.

So basically there's a hell of a lot more to it than 'let me help my friend gather bear asses'. You have to more or less consciously design it into your game from the beginning, and if you do so, you are potentially giving other things up that might be important in their own way. In other words, no, not every game should necessarily have it. That doesn't mean it isn't a great system - it absolutely was a core part of what was awesome about CoH. It doesn't mean it isn't something you should consider from the start when you sit down to make a game - but if you decide that other things about your model are important, and they don't play into a system like this, it isn't something you should feel awful about discarding because you have other play models you want to support instead.

That's fair, though I have to disagree with you on a number of points, mostly just out of this bizarre compulsion I have to evangelize anything CoX-related. My philosophy says that if you're going to make an MMOG, playing with other people should, generally, be at least as fun as playing alone. Not necessarily as rewarding or as necessary, but as fun in the moment-to-moment gameplay. Maybe it's just because I prefer doing things with people over talking with them, or because I'm not much of a traditional RPG gamer so I don't appreciate story quests, but the "massively single-player" trend always seemed a little backwards to me. I totally get that there are reasons for just wanting to do your own thing and that's fine, but even if you're designing for the single-player-plus-chatroom crowd I don't think there's any compelling reason not to facilitate grouping for players that enjoy it.

In particular, your reasons are generally valid against sidekicking up but not against examplaring down. Spoilers don't matter for downleveled players because you're only going through content that either you've already done or that you could do on your own at any time. You don't need a particular rewards system, because I don't need an in-game reward to want to play with my friend (this seems to be the primary disconnect between us). Getting the mechanics down would take a little work, but 95% of the time that would just mean slapping on level-based stat caps and a scaling factor to whatever weird trinket procs you have going on. Even if you did wind up being a bit OP, it wouldn't matter because, again, you're not getting any special rewards for your time.

I'm not asking for every game to scale into the chaotic fun times that CoX did when you get 8 people together. I just don't think it's right that to play with one other person, I have to ask "Does your character have the right {server|level|faction|starting zone|quest progression}?" and if the answer to any of those questions is no I'm out of luck even if I want to put up with all the inconveniences of grouping.

If SWTOR had pvp style 'blostering' tuned on for pve, more people would have had friends in their story missions, or played the planet threads as a duo or more. Which is the best thing there is to do in SWTOR.

Yes you might see other people's shit out of order, but you see everything bar your own story a thousand times anyway.

I want to single this bit out because I think it is the primary disconnect, but maybe not for the reason you think - it isn't so much that I personally need a reward for helping one of my specific friends; the point is more that if you want this to be a widely adopted system that goes beyond just people helping out other people they know - in other words a system that will actually be used enough to justify the work of actually implementing it - there has to be a reward structure in place to convince people to use this system with people they *don't* already know.

The reward in CoX below level 30, was just that it was fun.

At higher levels loot became a thing.

I didn't mean to imply you were a jerk to your friends! I think you're a cool dude. I do like to think you underestimate how often people are willing to hang out with other people just to goof around, but who knows.

No worries, I didn't think you meant that in that way. I am definitely from the pessimistic-about-the-average-MMO-gamer school of thought, yeah.

Examplaring down in pre-IO CoH was actually pretty much shit; you couldn't earn XP, only burn off XP-debt or earn money. Surprisingly, people still did it pretty often even though money was pretty worthless.

I wanted to take some screenshots of my old characters... but of course they're all locked. And even if I wanted to pay to unlock them the shop is disabled.

In response to the walloftext, I need to reiterate that mentoring works just fine in RIFT, which is as DIKU and 'close to WOW' as you can get. I'm not entirely sure how their scaling works, but my epiced-out level 50 definitely wasn't one-shotting things when I was downleveled to level 10-ish for Instant Adventures in Silverwood. I did feel more powerful, just when I was doing low-level zones in GW2 at level 60 (I had more abilities, PAs, did more damage, etc)... but it didn't feel trivialized.

But then, RIFT is also trying really hard to get GW2-ish dynamic / 'soft grouping' gameplay with the invasions, rifts, and Instant Adventures (the open grouping isn't really dissimilar to GW2's implicit grouping), the proposed "everyone gets the same stats" system in pvp, etc - so yeah.


e: also, some mission arcs (especially the story-heavy arcs in the Mission Architect and the Praetorian arcs of Going Rogue) had a very strong narrative despite the limitations of the medium. They were still self-contained stories though.

Wow this sucks...

I would log in about ever 3 months, just to see new stuff and fiddle around.

It did have extreme peaks and valleys on how things were done, from awesome to suck and all over the place, but sad to see it go.  Last time I logged in had a blast running some missions and taking in the new sites and new stuff.  They keep adding content like crazy.

If Asheron's Call is still chugging along, makes you wonder if Paragon couldn't buy out of NC and start anew.

Not that online protests and petitions have ever accomplished anything (or have any chance of accomplishing anything), but there's an ingame rally (http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,4935.0.html) being organized - 5pm EDT, Virtue serverm Atlas Park (obv). I'll log in for it just to watch the fireworks and maybe blow off some steam, because seriously... fuck this shit.

Just to back up a bit: it was brought up earlier in the thread that stats such as Warcraft has makes sidekicking difficult.  However, Blizzard already has one working gear scaling system (BoA gear) and is currently launching another (Valor points).  It's a solved problem, they'd just need to merge the code that makes BoA scaling work into the normal items.  Then sort out a way to handle level requirements and shit, because that would also need work.

Agree on CO beta, though no idea about launch and beyond. Don't agree about DCUO though. Had some very clever things, and did a respectable job of featuring the CoH-style overpowered feel.

And while at first I was skeptical of the limited UI, TSW and Rift have shown it can be fun to be forced to a limited set of abilities. And GW2 shows that the other way to have a limited UI is to just make the abilities contextual, obfuscating complexity just enough to make it approachable before it goes all bananas :)

Rift gives you a limit set of abilities?  :uhrr: You have way more active abilities in Rift than TSW; it's pretty close to WoW in regards to number of abilities I'd say (although fewer buttons if you use a macro for everything, I guess).

ChampO is a lot better than it was at launch. However, it still lacks that X factor that makes me want to come back and play further.

A lot of people call CoX and more specifically, its engine 'dated'. But c'mon. When was the last time you played an MMO that was capable of handling THIS shit right here:
Shot taken in one of the 30+ Atlas Parks during today's player protest. I wasn't there, I didn't know about it. But this makes my heart swell with pride.

Yes, they may have been competent.  It's still dated.

I wasn't aware Unreal Tournament was an MMO.

I do also like how you selectively quoted him to make your point.

Aww, I was going to resub for a month just to get ss's of my daughter's characters from when she was little.

I think one of the devs said they were planning on setting all accounts to paid status until the servers shut down, as soon as they can get around to it.

SWTOR can do that now.   One of the patches popped out an absolute home run on performance.  Right after the server mergers you'd routinely see that many at the PvP vendors.

Well, fuck.  Was just thinking of resubbing as Diablo 3 is waning.

Major loss to the industry.  I wonder why they didn't use the tech to pop out other games (it seems very flexible).

Put it in windowed mode and you can actually take screenshots at the character selection screen at least.

So I worked on CoH for 8 years (Left a year and a half ago).  AMA.

Why did power customization take so long?

All of the FX had to be remade from scratch.  They were originally colored and if you try to tint something colored it just doesn't work.  The tech end wasn't that bad, we needed to create the new UI, save the new fields and have it trickled down to the graphics engine. 

Art time was usually our long pole for any milestone, so it took a while before power fx finally seemed worth the time and effort.  (Its all about getting the most bang for your buck).

Thanks for helping create some great memories.   :awesome_for_real:

What took the fix to Enzymes (where you could slot them into Defense toggles and ED cap them in two enhancements) so long to come?

Oh hey, I remember you!  Loved when you'd post on the forums over there.  d(^_^)b

Still really sad to see CoX go.  I just don't understand why there's a need to shut the game down even if NCSoft isn't willing to invest anymore in any further development.

Probably the bug reports not escalating.  Would've been a trivial change.

When plotting out new features/content additions internally, how did you guys try to balance between "hey guys I have this really cool idea!" and "what can we add that will keep people subbed / attract unsubbed players to return?"  Or do/did you not see any tension between those two motives?

Heyyy I remember you talking in the MA Arc Finder channel a few months ago!  :awesome_for_real:

Speaking of which - what was you guys' outlook / plans for the Mission Architect? Did you see it as a novelty, a failed experiment, or something that's awesome and should be setting trends in the industry? Did the MA-related problems (copyright breaches, bad content, rampant farming, server load issues, etc) cause more headaches than it was worth?

Just chiming in with: Thanks for the memories! Too bad it's over.

This is the sad thing about online games. Whereas you can pick up a ten year old offline game from GOG and relive the memories, when the publisher loses interest in an MMO, it's usually gone forever.

And realize that it doesn't run properly under modern operating systems and 720x480 doesn't look so good anymore. CoH had a good run and still looks good (bar the character models). Though it looks like my dream of capping a character will never happen.

So I guess my question is if we can feel safe blaming the now cryptic leads for starving CoH in its youth.

Good times, Pohsby. Good times.  :grin:

Was CoH/V shutting down really a surprise for you? Putting aside how NCsoft handled it, was it something that was expected at some point if revenue kept going down like it was?

There were there were a different ways we would classify features, how well we thought they would help retention, how well they would help gain subscribers and how much you personally wanted it.  Lots of pet features got in just because someone pushed for it because it was there pet project.  Getting the most bang for the buck was constant consideration though.  If your pet project was gonna take 4 months, forget about it.

For a long time new subscriber/marketing push outweighed retention, unfortunately that meant a lot of QoL features were deferred.

I don't think there were extensive future plans for it.  Maybe a map builder at some point, but I think we mostly got it where we wanted it.  As to the problems, depends who you ask.  I think it was totally worth it.  Some designers, not so much.  The biggest argument before we started working on it was rewards.  The designers wanted it to be full simulation so there would be no rewards, just a tool for RPGers.  I was adamant that no one would use it if that were the case and constantly had to fight for it giving out rewards, farming be damned.

I guess it was out of the blue for the people still there in the sense there was no foreshadowing from the leaders.  However, I saw it coming a mile a way, its why I left.  It was inevitable.  If you look at subscription numbers it is just long steady decline.  The studio tried to start a new game 3 separate times and failed every single time.  The management of the studio kept doubling-down on CoH.  When they canceled the last new project to put everyone on making CoH F2P is when I started seriously job-seeking.  I'm sorry, but no matter how much development you add, not a lot of new people are gonna start playing an 8 year old game. 

I remember one of the dev's at some point stating re-subs were pretty significant for CoH.  I would have thought QoL would be seen as valuable in that case.

How far in advance was the storyline plotted out? For example, was the "death of Statesman" on the radar years earlier?

Were there deep, dark secrets of the game universe fleshed out well in advance, written in a Lore Bible somewhere for use in future story arcs, that nobody ever got around to using?  Along the lines of the "Rikti are really mutated alternate-earth humans rather than aliens" reveal?

Death of Statesman wasn't that far in advance, I think they decided to do that after I left, but I was pleased (Statesman is a boring dick of a character).

There was actually a "story bible."  Rick Dakan (http://www.rickdakan.com/), the originally lead designer was a great writer (not as good at designing), so he wrote up long detailed backstories on all of the villain groups.  When I found these, I printed them out and put them in the bathroom with the hopes that more people would read the stories.  It is amazing how many people just don't care, lots of the artists just have an "I want to make something cool, just tell me what to make" mentality.

I think most of the villain backstories came across through the missions and taskforces.  One story that didn't work out was Rularuu.  Rularuu was meant to be a Galactus style villain, excect that instead of planets he ate dimensions.   But when he came to our dimension, the magic heroes made a kind of fake poison pill dimension that Rularuu ate instead.  By doing so he imploded and was trapped in this fake dimension (Its magic, deal with it).

The shadow shard as written about was supposed to be remnants of the the game world floating about on random islands and mixed up, think the atlas park statue floating next to Terra Volta.  All villain groups would be present but as pale facimiles of the originals.  That is why there are those weird "whispers" that seem to make no sense.  Art reuse for the win!  However, the artists ended up making bizarre alien worlds with rivers of blood.   The Rularuu story was supposed to last for three issues, but it was such a failure that it was immediately abandoned and thereafter told as a cautionary tale about the dangers of momentum when no one is sterring the ship (everyone knew it was shitty, but we pressed on anyways).

Whats the deal the procedurally generated maps?  Besides adding a few new "legos" here and there, they stayed the same over the course the game. It feels like there was so wasted potential with them.  

The problem was that they were NOT procedurally generated.  Artists pieced together all the trays to make those maps.  This is why they felt so boring and repetitive.   10 small caves, 10 medium caves, 10 large caves.  After running them enough you know the layout and the spawn placement.

I tried several times to get procedural maps going but there was a lot of resistance.  Producers worried about bugs, designers worried about exploits, art worried about losing control.

I apologize in advance, but I have to ask -- the whole "5th Column/Council/5th Column again" thing, what on earth was the deal there?

Yeah, my Soviet hero was quite put out when the 5th Council disappeared.  He liked punchin' Nazis!

We were going to be released in Europe, more specifically Germany.  Despite the posts saying it was already planned and part of the story, yada yada yada, it was really Germany.  Germany has laws and rules about profiting off the likeness of Nazis and Wolfenstien had just made the news for being banned.  Truth be told, know one really knew any German law and if it would be legal or not, it wouldn't have mattered if we did, the attitude was better safe than sorry. 

So what was the deal with the big delay between (I believe I have the right ones in mind) Issues 6 and 7, from the launch of CoV to the first CoV update which brought its level cap up in line with CoH's? I remember it being some ridiculously long lag time (I want to say at least seven months?) with Villains stuck at level 40, and the long wait with nary a peep from Cryptic was what drove me from the game the first time after playing since damn near release.

All Good Things ...

Despite eventually leaving (btw, hard but smart to do), I'm sure you will always be proud knowing that hundreds of thousands of people around the world love CoH, and will always respect it as one of the very best MMOs of any era. The ongoing public support for somehow saving the game's operation is as intense as I've seen.

Some things I'd like your insight into whether these were discussed:

- non-instanced interiors for buildings, rather than them be opaque exteriors and some instance ZLs (perhaps dynamically generated for the scale of coverage, although poly count and scene complexity would be through the roof)
- breakable and damaged objects, such as shattered windows, splintered doors, demolished furniture or walls, in addition to physics of movement
- more urban warfare in the non-private-instanced city zones (PvP or PvE style), making more us of the airspace and building interiors (esp. with the preceding possible)

I always pictured CoH heroes literally flying out of shattered windows on the 44th floor in Steel Canyon, with a villain (PvP or PvE) flying out chasing them. Or fighting guerilla tactics within a skyscraper's office floors and elevator shafts. The "what's around the next corner" tension always seemed a great idea to build on, but the fixed office instance layouts lost this effect due to being too familiar and not occuring outside of private instances in the "real city".

And about the game, Paragon Studios and its future as a business:

- why do you think that no CoH emulator has really ever existed (I think cohemu tried years ago), despite most other AAA MMOs like WoW, DAoC and EQ having pretty elaborate ones?
- what deal at this point would you expect from any 3rd party (fan-driven or otherwise) to be most likely to be seriously considered by NCSoft, to keep the game alive or evolve it? (this obviously depends on the real reasons they shuttered it)
- what is your wishlist, if you had decent funds and time and control, to have done with CoH?

20 something issues when I left, they blur together.  No idea man.

Well, if you're going to get butthurt about me shortening the quote, I'll replace it in full.  Happy now?

The word used was engine.  You know, the client shit that renders things, takes input, and maybe simulates some basic physics.  Not the server shit which makes an MMO.  It's a dated engine, it looks dated, and using an old engine to draw lots of dudes just does not impress.

1 - This was mostly a performance issue.  

2 - That was a keystone feature on the Marvel MMO (which eventually turned into Champions), but the retrofitting to make that work in CoH was just too much.

3 - Again performance.  The other problem with making anything destructible is that players will ruin it.

4 - No one leaked the source code

5 - None, I remember wonder when they shut down AA, I asked why not just life-support it and stop development.  One of the producers listed off a bunch of reasons, but it boils down to its actually more hassle than its worth.

6 - The feature I was trying to push before I left (which is 100% technically feasible) was Teamless teaming.  The basic idea is, we have all of your character data, so we can easily create an NPC that looks like you and has your powers (this is actually in the Mission Architect as a clone).  Imagine if you are friends with Catass McGee.  Catass wants to play way more than you, but he likes having you around.  Catass invites you to team with him when you are not around.  You get the invite in a text or email or can set yourself to auto-accept (They really wanted to make a CoH app at the time, but couldn't think of anything useful for it to do).  If you accept, the game beams down an NPC that is a clone of you to follow Catass around like a pet.  While you are offline you can check the status of your proxy, see what rewards you got etc.  Its a win for everyone, Catass gets help and you get effortless rewards.  

Interesting, the D&D Facebook game does precisely that and it's pretty fun.


What sort of canceled MMO projects was Paragon up to?

CoH2 never really got too far, Korea was not interested.  There was a "Super powered being" project similar to Secret World (Modern day setting)  that had tech demos, character art, archetypes, but that got scrapped.  Last was a unity based minecrafty island adventure. 

There was a big disconnect between the Korean idea of an MMO and an American.  (CoH was released in Korea and bombed).   They gave us a presentation once on what they thought made a MMO more MMOey.  It basically came down to being able to grief someone.  My favorite section was when they were asked about Farmville, they said it wasn't a MMO, but would be a lot closer if you could go to other peoples farms and burn them down.

You know, after reading that it actually makes a lot more sense now why Cryptic wanted to get out from under NCSoft so badly.

You keep giving these mind-blowingly interesting answers, I'm going to feel incredibly disappointed if there's anything I forget to ask you.

I would play this game.

They should have listened more. That sounds like another memorable idea (that WoW would later steal).

It seems like a more personable take on faceless mercs.

CoH's fan base always seemed so dedicated and tight. The game design aligned with team, TF and supergroup play in mind, which may be why. Sure, you could solo and be a social outcast, but it would be painfully slow and you end up with nothing to do in the end anyhow. So whether that was intended or a by-product of just how everything evolved, it surely shaped CoH into the recogizable entity it became.

Imagine if CoH had the soloability of WoW questing, then what kind of community would it now have. Shudder.

One that didn't get its game canceled out from under it?  :-P

I knew that was coming when I hit Reply. :why_so_serious:

I don't remember having to group for quests in CoH.

Of course, I think my highest character got to 32 or something.

OTOH, I made zillions of characters!

He is referencing some of the uber instances and taskforce (raid) quests.  Which weren't hard to join at all.  Ya know, since it wasn't the trinity.

I believe this was because (and pohsyb can tell us different) CoV didn't hit its sales targets, NCsoft was shoving all its resources towards Tabula Rasa and suddenly Cryptic had to deal with a large resourcing cut. It was around this time CoV's lead Zeb Cook left and CoH/V's full-time development team dropped to about 15 people. It was also likely around this time that Cryptic realised what kind of publisher that NCsoft was and probably started thinking about its next project (which eventually became Marvel Universe Online, then Champions Online).

Pohsyb, if you can, what are your opinions of Jack Emmert? (Not sure if you are working at Cryptic currently.) The long-time fans often like to bash on him for anything and everything, but I wonder how much of that was deserved and how much of that was other factors.

Interesting about Rularuu - that zone was a great idea, but annoying as hell to get around and with the most unfriendly TFs in the game.

For those interested in such things, Matt Miller (Positron) has indicated he'll be answering a lot of fan questions about the lore and what didn't make it or changed sometime this week on the forums.

Thanks poyshb for the fun times and great memories.

 I stayed subscribed even when I didn't play regularly since I really thought you all had the best super hero game and one of the best MMO game.  I guess I owe Jack an apology, but I still felt like he was the reason the game slowed down and the slow leveling was placed in the game, of course this was way back in the beginning.

The ideas they have implemented in the game is incredible, from veteran rewards, item shops, things to make you look cool, things to make you level quicker, things to keep you alive longer.  And the fact that you wanted to group because it made things better, not because you had to group.

Gonna miss it.  Thanks again!

This.

When MMO soloing is as rewarding as grouping, most go solo - esp. the way modern MMO audiences are now conditioned. CoH gave you soloing and nice scaling instances and outdoor missions, but they also made sure group activities were more involved and epic, so you would choose them over soloing on your own. It was much more fun and hectic to scale up missions for fuller groups rather than solo them, and the xp flowed more consistently. And um, we'll ignore certain MA maps that somewhat overkilled this concept. :oh_i_see:

Having roles like Holy Trinity and designing content for role mixes isn't the problem; that creates interesing and varied content. It isn't the need for a tank or healer role, it's the fault of having a very specific class necessary to provide it. The key is to allow any class choices to effectively supply different overlapping roles quickly (RIFT and CoH both did this well, with CoH imo being more flexible with its awesome power set selections). GW2 went overboard in axing the roles themselves.

And when you do group, if it is so passive that you never say a word and can't remember one person you grouped with all day long, that says something too. Btw while I see some benefits to Dynamic Event virtual grouping, it also erodes even further any awareness of others. But it's great for soloers.

It is no conicidence that the games I vividly recall and remember player names and details of how they played, were all group-focused games with lots of typing and Vent communication, and none of them would be termed solo-friendly. And they have all lasted 6+ years. And of course all were sub games then, still enjoying the bachelor's life before being dragged to a shotgun wedding with f2p.

I remember many players and their details from early EQ, DAoC, CoH, LOTRO, yet almost nothing from Aion, AoC, WAR, SWTOR or GW2 (played for one week; which btw will end up like SWTOR but hide it better since its already f2p).

I checked the timeline and that was around when "City of Hero" was release in Korea.  We had to do a ton of silly work for Korea  (Art had to redo lots of effects, they had to make the boy-girl looking faces and allow the body type to be more slender.  Also there were changes to targeting, movement, UI, etc.  We had to make the game playable with one hand since apparently all Koreans smoke while they play.  There were no other projects besides CoV and CoH at the time.

As for Jack...I am not a fan, lets leave it at that.

I guess this is now the bug pohsyb thread. ;D
A good call on your part.  People like rewards, even if they're simple.

Kinda sad I never got around to Mary Sue-ing my tanker, Jersey Girl's, crusade against the 'sinister' plots of Hero Burger.

Well he did ask for it.  :grin:

I'm also curious about the thought processes behind and the feelings around the office regarding Enhancement Diversification back in the day. It was such a huge deal back then, but it seems like the live team's walked back from it pretty much every issue since, starting with the introduction of Inventions.

Well, all I can say is that CoH holds some of my fondest MMO memories next to EQ, not the least of which was the awesome final night of beta. And you devs went out of your way on occasion to make sure the game was playable for the vast majority even when you didn't have to. I remember there was some weird texturing bug (well, it was more like the texturing just wasn't geared for older GPUs) that turned most of the world and mobs into shadow/wireframe figures. Some enterprising individual in the community came up with a solution, submitted it to Cryptic and you guys worked with him and over the course of a month or two, those of us with some fairly poor laptop GPUs were playing and having almost as good an experience as those on desktops. I had both laptop and desktop so I wasn't out in the cold, but it was very cool that you all took the time to extend the minimum graphics range of the game. Five stars in my book. I've never had the feeling that any other MMO devs had that much kindness in their hearts.

Before release it was obvious to anyone mathematically minded that the enhancement escalation was insane.  To be able to take one aspect of a power (say damage) and multiply it by three was so broken...Oh you enhanced that slow into a root, 100% damage resistance, 100% defense,  Perma-whatever.  Not to mention the incredible jumps in power ability.  This might've been mitigated had SO and DO remained drop-only (as was originally intended) because no one would be able to reliably 6-slot a power until 50 (actually 40 at the time).  However, Jack threw DO's and SO's into the stores as a last minute decision.


Adding diminishing returns was the only way to smooth the power level, and Inventions just improved on that by adding gradually increasing enhancements for every level.  Even with Inventions you cannot boost powers to the extremes allowed pre-ED.

Side note: the first player to Max level was an AR/Dev Blaster.  At the time superspeed had a 95% defense bonus and -95% accuracy penalty, the designers were worried you'd go so fast you'd run into mobs and be killed accidentally.  However, powers that actually cast invisible pets (Burn Patch, caltrops, etc) did not suffer the penalty.  So this guy enhances caltrops (which is auto-hit) with slows such that it becomes a big AE root.  Then he enhances burn-patch, also auto-hit, which 6 slotted would kill a boss if every tick hit (Burn patch did so much damage because the mobs would instantly flee it, so they'd usually only get hit for 1 or two ticks of damage).  Then he ran around, invincible with superspeed, throwing down caltrops and burn patch on every encounter he crossed.  He did not even need to wait around for them to die because there was unlimited range for kill credits.

ED, despite the whining, was one of the best/most justified needs I've ever seen in an MMO.

I definitely agree, even though between it and I5's global defense nerf, my old main (Broad Sword/Invuln Scrapper) was knocked down enough pegs that I never really played him anymore.

I was gonna try to log in and have a last hurrah, but not only cannot I not recall my account information -- you can't even download the client anymore.

Oh well. Lord Monochrome shall rest in piece.

I'm going to keep asking questions until Pohsyb says stop.  :grin:

What was the separation of Cryptic and Paragoin Studios like? Was it public knowledge internally that such a deal was being struck, or was it a surprise one day that you are offered to either stay with NCsoft or go with Cryptic?

Why did powersets go from "too expensive and time intensive for new ones" for so long, only to start being released en masse (comparatively) even before I20? Was there a technical bottleneck that was overcome, more people added, just a focus on the F2P transition that needed more powersets, or something else?

From the outside, it seemed that CoH/V had a number of potentially great systems that just fell short, but no-one went back to refine them (e.g. Gladiator combat, base building, a number of zones left hanging). Was this due to that pet project effect, or did management lack focus or get stuck in a mode where they were fighting fires all the time and not planning things out very well? (Not looking for blame here, just interested about things like introducing a construction site in Steel Canyon that never went anywhere else.)

Also, I'll leave this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRsj2DtLCQs

And someone wanted me to say:

I was on the Marvel Project (which turned into Champions) at the time, but it was so awful I had been asking to go back to CoH. I was actually job seeking at the time, because I sensed the impending fail.  My boss just kept saying, we'll see because he knew the negotiations were pending.  Since they knew I wanted to jump projects, NCSoft had an offer ready for me.  Cryptic and NCSoft had a 50/50 split on the CoH IP which made doing things...hard.  So Cryptic offered either to buy it all or sell their share.  NCSoft decided to buy.  The timing was crazy because a week later Microsoft decided to pull the plug on the Marvel project.

Animators are the biggest bottle neck on powers.  Usually there was a new villain group in the works which would take the bulk of the animation time.

As for abandoned projects, probably a mixture of abandonment and the stigma of failure.  No one wanted to work on something that was not successful.  The arena was a failure, so it was hard to justify spending resources to improve it, same for SG bases.  Revisiting zones was a big investment, I think some of the construction bits artists did on free time.

Koro, Leandro is awesome, he helped me find a ton of bugs.

Thanks Pohsyb.

Since you brought it up, I have to ask: in your opinion, what went so wrong on MUO / ChampO?

To hear that supergroup bases were considered a failure surprises me; I always thought they were one of the most awesome parts of the game.  Very, very fiddly to get them looking right, and I always wondered why it was never revisited to make the construction interface better, but even with the difficulties I've seen some really amazing layouts and bases people put together.  Many of the people I knew definitely put a lot of effort into the bases and enjoyed them greatly.

Bases did have massive potential and customability (iirc, someone crashed their base only after putting in 16 000+ separate objects) but the design decision about how to charge for base items through prestige put such things out of most people's reach. So it was a great system that was never fully adopted by players.

I think most of the stigma of "failure" for bases may've been centered around the whole raiding concept and the Items of Power and all that jazz, which never panned out.

True, that whole "base raid" thing never worked out.

I do remember Emmert coming out at one point talking about bases saying that it was the thing they'd spent the most time on with CoV and it was something players didn't take up. But that view seemed to ignore that rent costs were extortionate for all but the most active SGs.

On my last revisit to CoH a while ago bases were pointless because, I was informed, almost everyone was in a personal super-group to get more storage. Though I missed the period at which they were even trying to make them a raid target.

They had some nice settings though, it was fun walking around the one I had access to for an evening.

At one point there was some kind of base raiding for items of power put in, but it was horribly exploitable or broke something, so it was pulled iirc.

- First the feel was just off.  Moving around in the world, targeting, using powers felt clunky.   That combined with bad performance at the time made testing/debugging a chore rather than a joy. 
- The art direction took a turn that I hated (that super shiny plasticy look).
- I didn't have any respect for the designers working on the project.
- The above could've been fixed, but the bigger problems was that there was no long term sight, it was all about cobbling together a facade for the next milestone review, 80% of my time was spent rushing on some feature that was likely throw-away.  (I figured it was only a matter of time before Mircosoft realized this)

On bases (to the best of my memory):
If you built a base, then put down the required items in the base, you would gain access to a Rularuu raid.
Supergroups could raid Rularuu to get an item of power, but this could only be acquired once a week.  The item of power would give buff to every member of the supergroup.
Once you acquired an item of power, your base could be raided and the item of power could be stolen.
A max size base could only hold 3 items of power, and they would only last for a month.
One problem with supergroup raids was scheduling (what happens if no one is on?), this meant there was complicated UI were you could set when your allowed raiding hours were.

I think it was a failure for two reasons.  There was a large barrier to entry so your typical player could not participate.  The original rent system meant that you couldn't even earn prestige over time, you had to keep earning it. Also, this is partly my fault, the UI to build a base was confusing.  In general, map editing is convoluted and our implementation wasn't great.  There were a lot of rules in the original editor that were there to prevent raid exploits (which never even mattered).

Later the item of power idea got dropped and they were gonna have simple SG vs. SG challenge raids that would create a map with both bases on it and the doors linked.  The backend work was done for that, I'm not sure why it was never released.

One pet idea I kept pushing was to have a SG vs. NPC raid.  It would play out like a tower defense game.  

I ended up using mine that way, but it had been 1000+ days since anyone else in the SG logged in, and storage was SO bloody limited for crafting.  I'd rather they had a slot system like GW2 so I could just stash everything.

I ended up with rows upon rows of crates, plus a couple of IO tables...

*sheds a few tears*  :sad_panda:

Still can't believe it's going away. A huge thank you to pohsyb and all the other great devs who worked on it over the years and let me fulfill my spandex-clad fantasies. No, the other ones.

This one seemed such an obvious and good idea. All those turrets and no dumb NPC's to shoot. And those attacks the defenders could trigger to avoid time-zone wars and player work-arounds for the limits of turret AI.

Another problem was that there were, I believe, only a very tiny handful of IoPs per server. Some ridiculously small number like three or five.

Remember my maxim - Koreans are literally fucking insane.

pohsyb, can you shed any light on why Back Alley Brawler was let go?

Those are both criticisms I've had for Champions Online.

Yeah, after they cancelled the new project and said we were going F2P, the studio head invited everyone for a 1 on 1 meeting.  Even though I thought investing more in CoH was stupid way to go, I put on a happy face and said, "Sounds great boss, I can't wait!".  From what I hear, BAB did not.

A short time later we had a round of layoffs.  The layoffs seemed to be either anyone not on board with the new F2P vision or with enough seniority to be expensive.  The department leads (art, tech, design) were not consulted.  As part of tech, we lost every server-end programmer.  BAB at the time knew more about the animation and powers system than anyone else there.  Knowledge of the game engine was lost when he left.

Thanks. That makes sense now but was very shocking at the time.

Also he looks like Haemish's avatar IRL.  Every time I see Haemish I think that.

That's actually Haemish in his avatar iirc.

(http://forums.f13.net/index.php?action=dlattach;attach=4886;type=avatar) (http://i241.photobucket.com/albums/ff103/NCsoftavonminden/Chris_Bruce_Cropped_small-1.jpg)

Pohsyb, was there a turning point in either your time at Cryptic or Paragon where things could have gone differently if only another path was taken? Something that would have seen player numbers increase or CoH/V recapture public attention rather than the constant decline the game saw?

Right now CoH/V is gettnig a lot of love with the news that it is being shuttered, but it comes from people who previously played the game but haven't been recently.

Is he dual-wielding nerf sticks there?  :awesome_for_real:

I'm totally working in the wrong field...They get pissy if I bring weapons to work. :)

Escrima sticks if I don't miss my guess.

--Dave

My guess is that they were to help him figure out the Dual Blades power set animations (loved those animations).

Wow, just...wow.

That should be the game trailer. Let's see other MMOs put 1/10th of those numbers in clip without a slideshow.

On second viewing, hell 1/20th.

I know it's a composite but Virtue must have had ~3,000 on realtime right?

I'm a programmer, not a fortune-teller.  Generally, as a studio, we did what we thought would be most successful.  Ruluaruu, and to a smaller degree the arena, are the only times there was a real sense of, "This isn't going to work, but we've gone this far, might as well push the turd out"

I just wish we could've been serious about CoH2 at some point.

Completely unrelated to the topic at hand, but I am so stealing this to use at work.  I may even add it to my e-mail signature. 

I lasted about 2 months from launch of CoH.  I never went back.  Way to grindy, repetitive, and shallow for my tastes.

Amazing that all these "newer" games are shutting down.  UO is still in action, no?  That is still the game I spent most my time on.  WoW is a close second.

Pretty sure The Realm is still going, too.

CoH preceded WoW.

Pohsyb, were there any systems that had a lot of development time put in that were abandoned before going live, or just never worked out right?

Also, what were the plans to improve on CoH/V for CoH/V 2? What lessons were learned from the development of CoH/V that should be applied to the next superhero MMO?

What other feature ideas could have leveraged the outdoor zones more (without instance hopping)?

In early CoH I remember zone hunting a lot, from Perez Park to Founder's Falls waterfront - when it was a challenge even for a team. We treated all the outdoor zones like instances to grind through, but they became just empty spaces to travel through later.

Phasing? Or too much to retrofit into the design w/o it being CoH2? Phasing seems like a more shared open-world answer to private content state than outright zone-separated instances.

Supergroup base raids, never seemed to work out.  Also apartments.

CoH 2 was (when we were brain-storming and working on it) was not going to be a revolution, just an attempt to fix the problems of CoH.  A combat system that was mathematically balanced and solved the worst problems in the CoH system: instant death, control, jousting, defense cascade failure, to-hit vs. accuracy confusion, etc.  At some point I had a working combat engine that addressed a lot of these.  No more pointless throw-away missions, more outdoor stuff, seamless zones, other locations. There would be character transfers between CoH1 and CoH2.

I remember talking about phasing, I'm pretty sure we used it in some cases (I can't recall where).  Outdoor area's are difficult to balance the "just passing through" with "you kill stealing dick, that was MY McGuffin!".  From what I hear GW2 has handled this superbly.

It handles it superbly, mechanically speaking. It comes at the cost of story coherence to an extent (which is probably a good trade in most people's eyes). You'll wander in halfway through an event and get some objectives, do them, get rewarded, without ever necessarily knowing why you were doing it, etc.

There is pretty much no such thing as kill-stealing in GW2. You hit a mob, you get full XP and possible loot drops, regardless of who did the lion's share of the damage. It's a system that works and encourages other players to help people out as they pass by. That you also get XP for helping pick up downed or defeated players is another small change with big picture implications.

I'm playing a Thief in GW2 at the moment and it's honestly the closest I've come across in any other MMO to the feel of playing a Scrapper from CoH. My main character was a Martial Arts/Super Reflexes Scrapper (amongst many, many other chars) from the get-go, and though I stopped seriously playing CoH/V (CoX damnit!) a few years back; it remains the game I have put more time and love into than any other in my life.

So I'd just like to say thank you for all your efforts - even if you feel some of them were failures, I can assure you I pretty much had a go at most of them. I liked Rularuu. It was weird and arty and felt pretty much like a Dimension gone wrong. I guessed there was always meant to be more to it but what was there suited me just fine. I even used the Arena. And don't get me started on Bases... I swear those kept me playing for at least another year on the creative merit alone.

My question is: who developed Super Jump? It's pretty much the most fun singular power (let alone travel form) in any MMO I've ever played. It was practically a minigame in its own right.

This is one of the things that bugged me a little about CoH's design. If you're going Super Reflexes, doesn't Dark Melee then automatically become the "best" attack power, since it synergizes perfectly with your defense power and lets you neutralize a huge percentage of enemy attacks with no cost on your end?

Well if you're mixing Dark Melee and Super Reflexes, there's certainly going to be some hefty cost to your End.  :awesome_for_real:

With Super Reflexes it is relatively easy to soft cap Defense with IOs so Dark Melee helps prevent/delay the cascading problem failure that pohsyb mentioned but it isn't strictly necessary for protection unless you are on a budget or you are in the habit of fighting bosses higher level than you.

Martin.  He was a wizard.  He did all the physics stuff, including the interaction between server/client.  Server ran physics for every client too (you can't trust the client!), but they were in different time spaces.  There were a few builds with serious rubber-banding, but he managed to solve it.  He had a good feeling for what 'felt' right, even if its not realistic (Controlling your trajectory mid-air, power-sliding up angled surfaces, stairs not shaking the hell out of the camera).  He also did the AI pathfinding.

A realistic Super Jump would have been a tragedy to play; I always figured the ability to alter your trajectory was the 'Super' in Super Jump. I remember making an in-game engine movie of my MA/SR SJ'ing around the old Faultline zone before it got updated; pure vertigo. Oh, yes. And that's another unique CoX feature people forget: the ability to make movies in real time. Even if only a small portion of the playerbase utilised it, that it existed at all was amazing to me.

Super Jump was the best. Unless it made much more thematic sense to pick something else, I ALWAYS picked Super Jump in CoH. Unfortunately, CoV's layout made fly a lot more sensible, but ... I still mostly took Super Jump, because come on.

In order of speed:
TP > SS > SJ > Fly

In order of fun:
SJ > SS > Fly > TP

SS was probably the most useful, it was the only one you could use effectively indoors (plus it opened up hasten).  I usually combo-ed SS and SJ on any character I had.

I have to put fly ahead just because it was the best at making navigating the world easier. Super jump was clearly the most fun though. I never got the hang of super speed, always overshooting where I wanted to go and running off of cliffs and shit.

TP was pretty exciting back in the day before you hovered briefly :awesome_for_real:

My main at one point had Fly, SS, *and* Inertial Reduction *and* Siphon Speed.:drill:

Eventually I had to give up on IR, though, *sniff*.

I usually took two travel powers on each character. To date, no other mmo has managed to make travel as fun as any one of the powers.

My warshade had built-in TP and fly! No super-jump though. /sadface

This times a billion, plus one. Best travel power in any game ever, MMG or otherwise. Travel through Steel Canyon was exhilarating.

I always preferred super speed myself.  Jumping around was amusing, but I loved zipping around on foot.  It would have only been more awesome if you could do the 'run up walls' thing.

Those two-hour jetpacks were nice for making up for the few weaknesses in my natural powers.  I had one and never ran out of time on it, because I'd use it for a handful of seconds at a time to get over a particular obstacle or whatever, then back to running.

Super jump and a city environment was hours of fun all by itself.

What's happening in here ...  :awesome_for_real:

P.S. Haemish, can you please change my name to andybelford or something like that.

This forever.

Close to or around about.

We did some major server infrastructure improvements prior to the Hybrid conversion. We managed to get 6K+ players on one shard concurrently during a stress test and the server didn't even skip a beat.

How did we get 6k people on a server simultaneously you ask? Offered a badge of course.

I will also chime in for whoever is listening and say thanks for Super Jump, and CoX in general. While I have probably played WoW more, and AO was my first, CoX will forever be special as the place I could be a hero (or in my fire tankers case, a god). Oh, and the combat spanked the pants off anything before or after in the MMO space, nothing may ever measure up to wading into a room packed to the rafters with mobs and watching your team of ten lay into them with dozens of awesome powers. Now I am really missing the game...

Super Jump also led to those great panic moments of "Jump over this building and AHHH LANDING IN FREAKSHOW JUMP JUMP JUMP AHHH LANDING IN NEMESIS AHHH JUMP JUMP DEAD".

That's how you learned to get good at Super Jump.

Now I'm wishing I played more with Super Jump. :) I almost always took flying. I like raining death from above, and enjoyed being able to hover. (At least with blasters and equivilants).

Nothing says "I'm about to wreck your entire day" like a guy in spandex who doesn't deign to ever touch the ground.

I'm just sitting back in a lawnchair with a bag of popcorn.

Superjump was great for hit 'n' run tactics. I used to love jumping into a bunch of baddies, troll them with some damage and then jump away. They'd start to give chase at which point I'd just superjump around in a large circle, get them to disperse a bit, jump back down take out a couple, jump away and laugh 'Tee hee hee, can't catch me!' Until one of the bastards would teleport me to him and another would mez me while a third would pound the shit out of me. Then it was brown spandex time. Fucking Tsoo.

Arcana as in ville...?

Yes, this. CoX had the most fun combat of any game I've played before or since, out of the gate. Travel powers still are the best. I haven't seen a better character creator.

Thanks to those who made it all possible.

"Oh hell I mis-clicked I'm up against a building TURN TURN TURN NO DON'T FALL PORT NOW ANYWHERE whew."

I loved Teleport.

I loved the fact that CoH saved my custom ;binds server-side even more, so whenever I'd uninstall CoH and come back six months later, my good old shift+left click teleport bind still worked.

If you want to save your character state info in XML format, for future use in anything ranging from a simple character model viewer, zone browser, or the game if they keep it alive but don't have the character databases ...

Use this Titan Networks tool (http://cit.cohtitan.com/sentinelplus) while logged in on any of your characters (same folks trying to save CoH; I've used it often)

Sadly I can't get to my character. No City of Heroes client, and no way to download it.

Ahahaha, I did that so many times. <3

Teleport was also good for moments of panic like that, but I only had that on one of my characters.

The game switched to using the NCsoft launcher a few years back. Download the launcher from here and from there you can download the game:

http://us.ncsoft.com/en/launcher/ncsoft-launcher.html

Great...that leaves merely the fact that I can't remember my password. And my secret question answer is wrong....:) When is the closing date?

Don't think they've announced one yet.

November 30.

Thanks. Now just waiting on support to help me reset my password. Amusingly, if I click on the link their email sends me to 'check the status of my ticket' I end up at the German City of Heroes website.

You know, if this game is still profitable -- I'm curious why they're shutting it down. Or at least not spinning it off Station Pass style.

It's not entirely clear how profitable Paragon Studios actually is, but their only product has seen a boxed expansion and then a F2P conversion over the last two years and revenue just keeps trending down.

NCsoft's alternative move would have been to fire a lot of people at Paragon Studios and put the game into maintenance mode. But they aren't SOE - they aim to have high performing titles rather than a wide range of just-profitable games. So it makes a kind of business sense to take whatever they spend on CoH/V - who isn't going to grow any more - and put it into GW2 and / or Wildstar instead.

I suppose. I guess that's one reason I don't run a business. I can't help but look at any positive revenue stream and think "Anything is better than nothing" -- I'd either try to sell CoX to someone willing to run it in maintaince mode, or switch it over myself. I suppose it depends on the critical number of subs too.

I'd at least test the waters, but hey -- I don't run the place. :)

Once you get publically traded its a different ball game.  Especially with entertainment stock.

No doubt. I really don't get the market these days. Too speculation driven, and I don't doubt it filters down into any publically traded company. Can't have merely "profitable" if there's a guy whose doing even better, even if you're making video games and he's making soft drinks.

SOE is part of a publicly traded company.

SOE doesn't have a stellar performer that allows them to shut down everything else.

For a long time SOE relied on the Station Pass as an attraction for players, which sounded better with a lot of titles. And even then, The Matrix Online was shut down (with a reputed 0.5 developer working on it).

Now that everything is going F2P, they may not be so content to keep titles hanging around if they aren't profitable. Although if the game has been active long enough, there's a chance it has enough zombie accounts to keep it profitable, even if almost no-one actually plays it.

There was talk about an NCsoft Pass for a while, but it never happened.

I haven't had that power for years.

Adding to this: if you have made storyarcs for the Mission Architect, you can preserve them by exporting the file via the MA editor interface (save locally). You can also make a recording of the arcs by running through them using /demorecord. If you save a demo this way, you (or anyone else) can play it back by running the client from the command line -- presumably this will work even after the servers go dark. You can also use this to get a montage of your characters, SG base, etc.

Info about demo recording here (http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Demo_Recording)

That worked really hard at not letting you feel very super. Hence the lack of stickiness in my case.

CoH/V's official AMA (https://docs.google.com/document/d/19qbHHrRmifxGPz60-_ApLNiwOmF5QVEMrXHgB1Nrd4o/preview?pli=1&sle=true).

Some interesting stuff, depending on how far back you can remember / what you knew about CoH/V to begin with.

Bloody hell, what a blast from the past. Well, some of it. A lot of the newer stuff just flew right over my head, but still - the sheer fucking balls of the CoX story team, wrangling all of that shit together into a Master Story Arc. Madness. Awesome, headache inducing madness.

Also, gold:

Good times, good times.

(http://i.imgur.com/SpSsG.jpg)

I played a lot of CoH with friends, and I'll be sad to see it go.

 :heartbreak:

I don't have the foundation to understand most of that lore post... but now I actually wish I did :/

For a long, long time CoH/V had indicated a moon-based zone was going to happen. There was a construction site in Steel Canyon (?) and one of the villain zones where there was talk of a launch station being built.

I also think there was some kind of survey that went out that mentioned a space / moon zone.

But then nothing happened.

My heartbreak was mostly at how sad they sounded about it.  :heartbreak:

I imagine they were excited to finally get it in the game.  I'd be sad, too.

Summer Blockbuster – October 5 – October 8
Double XP – October 18 – October 22
Halloween Event – October 26 – October 29
Winter Event – November 9 – November 12
Rikti Invasion – November 23 – November 30

Live Server Shutdown – November 30 12:00 AM PDT

... apparently. No money or dev time for unique events I guess. It would be nice if they've made all the accounts premium so I can be there for the end, sad as it is.

Doubtful there will be much else, as apparently the last few remaining folks have packed up and left aside from one or two techs to keep the servers on until the 30th.

Well, I was there for the first Rikti invasion and I'll be there for the final one as well.

Why the hell am i sad that a game i never played is shutting down?

Wow, I loved this game when it came out, as buggy as it was. The travel powers, solid roles for people...it was awesome. The group combat was the absolute best, especially the higher you got (though low was fun too). I remember some crazy fight in the Grecoroman expansion...everyone else dropped like like a sack of bricks, except for my nearly-invincible DM/SR scrapper, who would just methodically work through the mobs, calmly cycling through the full gamut of powers...hardly getting hit, lifetapping when needed, with great stamina regen, and then attack strength-tapping hordes at a time to just smash through stuff.

I'll really miss this one.

Probably because it has been around FOREVER.

NCsoft responds to calls to keep CoH/V alive with, "Yep, no, still closing the game" (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.390019-NCSoft-City-of-Heroes-Cant-Be-Saved?page=1).

Just a PSA - the game shuts off for good on the midnight of Nov 30. There are no major events planned as far as I know, though the rikti invasion meta-event will be going on at the time. I'll probably be around during the last 2 hours on Virtue - flying around Paragon one last time, playing through some MA story arcs for nostalgia, killing Frostfire for the n-th time, and whatnot.

/sadface

Do you know if they put active accounts to premium so I could actually do that with my locked off characters?

Will keep some fond memories of this game.

They did not.  I was only able to unlock a few of my characters yesterday.

I thought I was a little melancholy about this, then I logged in, tried to fight the terrible movement interface for 10 mins and logged out a lot less sad.

Terrible movement interface?  :headscratch:

Logged in for the last couple of nights; now I'm not sad - I'm angry. This game does not deserve to die. NCSoft are insane.

I want to reach in and pull out all my characters to save them, somehow. They're living things to me.

this (http://cit.cohtitan.com/sentinel/) is as far as you'll get, unfortunately (along with saving the costumes and whatnot). Well, that and /demorecord.

Speaking of which, I'll probably do a runthrough of my MA arcs (or at leats the one that got DC) with /demorecord, since it seems it may be possible to play it back even if the servers are down. Works with bases too, if you can still get in (nobody in my guild/SG had a VIP account when they turned off the store, so there's no way for us to pay off the rent and access our base. Oh well.)

I took the day off work to play :awesome_for_real:

I can't log in. It would just make it hurt more.

Yes, that's how I feel about it too. I want to be left alone with my bittersweet memories.

We crashed The Hive on Virtue :awesome_for_real: :oh_i_see:

Edit: Virtue meltdown in progress

And I am done. I leave, on my own terms, shaking my ass doing the monkey dance in Pocket D next to Nevermore, forever.  :heart:

I made the mistake of switching to Atlas Park 1 in Virtue. Got mapserved about 10 seconds later and now am sitting in an endless queue. Do VIPs get priority queues? That may just mean I'll be sitting in this queue until the end of the world!

Gallows humor quote of the day so far:
[Admin] NCsoft_Hit_Streak: Engineers say that the server problems should be resolved soon. ETA: 4 hours. Thanks for your patience.

Can't get back on Virtue now :heartbreak:

You will be missed City of Heroes (and stinky Villains).

Edit: back on after Virtue reboot, hopefully I can stay on till they turn off the lights

Edit2: Drat got MS'd again can't get back on

Das ist alles.

So it goes. :(

Stayed to the bitter end. We rocked the shit out of AP3 on Freedom. For all it's faults, there just hasn't been, nor probably ever will be an MMO that's as fun.

Fuck.

 :heartbreak:

I brought the Silent Film Zombie Apocalypse to the party. :)

Not pictured is Buster Keaton. He was the Ghost summon that would come from resurrecting one of the fallen minions.

Zeppo always gets left out.

Good-bye Jersey Girl, Dark Matter, Latency, and all the rest.

It all kinda ended in a rather cool way though. The devs sent out some final kind words and consolations and I decided to take one final spin around AP. I guess the clock had already hit midnight December 1st on the server because it started to snow. Gave me a kinda 'Aww...that's cool' feeling.

And I guess the little demon pet could be Zeppo. :)

I was a skeptic when this game released, but quickly became a believer.  CoH made me optimistic that an MMO can be fun again... even in 3D.

I'll miss you CoH.  A lot!  :heartbreak:

Was subscribed all the way from the beginning to the end, was a great time gonna miss it.

Spent all day 11/30 playing some of my characters on Virtue, Pinnacle and Justice.

Mapserved down 4 times on Virtue in the evening hours, the last time at 11:53pm so I restarted on Pinnacle knowing I wouldn't make it back in to Virtue.

As for movement, I don't know what you are smoking if you think CoH's flight, superjump, superspeed, hover mechanics and animatinos aren't the best ever. I mouselook unless on the ground, and usually arrow key around in missions (mainly due to the insane speeds of stacked AM and such).


I was there at launch, stopped subbing after a few years, returned off and on to sub (then just log on free with Freedom in effect). But it is defintely one of thoe games that sticks with you as part of your lifelong roster of notables.

Super-jump and teleport were just amazing fun. I always dreamed of getting a character to 50, guess that's not happening.

Also still blame the now cryptic people for starving it of attention when it was younger, possibly not fair, but oh well.

I think my favorite thing to do was 'skate fight' during the winter events. All the lakes and such would freeze over and if you could draw some enemies to you, you could skate around with them trading blows and powers. It was just unbelievably fun and cool to watch.

Paragon City is finally crime free.  The presence of players is what cause the server to spawn critters.  No heroes, no more crime.  : (

Thanks for helping create all the memories pohsyb.

Indeed.  I had fun during my time in CoH. 

Reposted from my Facebook page. Nothing that hasn't already been said.

I'm sad to see this one go, and I wasn't in a position to re-download the client to look up some characters. The travel powers and custom titles were some of the coolest bits in the game. I didn't play it much in recent years so I cannot comment on the more-recent additions, but what I saw...I liked.

I'll miss my main DM/SR scrapper, who became nigh-invincible once I got into the 30s and had near-infinite stamina, was hard to hit, and could regen health while also debuffing surrounding mobs. I even gave him 3 costumes - his basic costume, a "casual/street" costume, and an up-armored version...you know, for when times got tough.  :grin:

I've said this before, and I'll say it again. CoH had the best character creator ever, and the quickest route to fun in any MMO I've played. Felt like a superhero right off the bat, and certainly by the time travel powers were acquired. So sad to see it gone.

bye dark/dark scrapper.
i was hoping champions is more of the fun... but going into the F2P game, it wasn't like it.
the super speeding past mission maps, getting to the end boss and just going all out with a party was something.
side kicking was good too.
i used to play with a classmate just clearing missions. he was 10 levels behind but can still keep up.
o well.

I'll miss the street sweeping that happened around release.  Was some of the most fun I've ever had.  Running around taking out villains, running into other heros and then teaming up with the randoms you just met.

That game had one of the better communities in the MMO Genre.  How many other games had guilds/groups so dedicated to helping out others that they were across every server in the game.  Taxi Bots, Hollows Rescue Force etc.. (names might be slightly off)

Another thing they go right that other MMO's haven't bothered trying with was allowing you to revisit old content.  Ouroboros was a great system idea.  Allowing your players to go "back in time" to revisit their favorite story arcs or experience content they missed.  Hell they had even added in some content that was removed from the game. (Original Posi TF, and that one TF with Calvin Scott are the big ones I recall)

I enjoyed that game, even in the later years when I would pop in for a couple months of playing every so often.  I ended up making my own SG just for myself at one point to have fun with the base editor and to get even easier ports around the Rogue Isles.

Still only got 1 character to 50 though.  I kept quitting my alts in their 40's.  RIP: Seismic Phoenix, the Stone Melee Fiery Aura Brute.

True that.

Super Speed...oh my god, I thought it was one of the coolest things ever when I finally got it. Especially since I also had prestige pre-order movement powers and got the movement abilities in the SR and Fitness trees...made exploration fairly safe, as I zipped around maps at near the speed of light while looking like a huge spammy beacon of light. :oh_i_see:

DC Online had a good version of super speed, which included running up walls and actual acceleration...but it wasn't the same.

First time I played COH and got super jumping I was like THIS is how you do a super hero game. I enjoyed COH quite a bit they did some things amazingly well. To this day they have done the group/support characters the best of any MMO. Instead of having a healer you had your support people who supported in different but good ways. Sure you could make a healer or you could have a shielder to help avoid damage in the first place or a debuffer to make its o you don't need as much healing.

I am really shocked more MMO that came out after did not steal this concept and most fell back into the tank/dps/healer triangle.

It is sad to see it go but it had a really good and long run.

The point about support classes doesn't just apply to the defender class either. Controllers were equally great.

This was the last significant game to feature all 3 of the holy trinity classes, and I often feel like the only guy on earth who misses controllers/enchanters - they are inherently interesting to play, and CoX demonstrated that  if they are properly designed devs really don't need to warp the difficulty curve around them.

RIP, superjump.  :heartbreak:

Well there's at least one other person here that feels the same way.  Mained an Illusionist in EQ2 and my most played character in CoH (between bouts of rampant altaholism) was my Earth/Storm Controller.  She definitely wasn't the fastest soloer but the amount of control she could throw around was ridiculous.  And creating 8ft high stone cages during Rikti invasions never got old!  :grin:  The old pre-I5 days when you'd join a team and hear "Yay, a Controller!" because we could turn entire rooms of mobs into statues was pretty cool too.

The only real flaw (if you want to call it that) with support characters was that they were grossly overpowered when you stacked them.  All Rad superteams could trivialise just about any content in the game from what I remember.  Fun times but probably a bit broken.

Which I think is part of the reason the "trinity" has shifted to Tank, Heal, DPS vs. Tank, Heal, Support (throw dps in).  It becomes too easy to trivialize encounters if Control was stacked, or too difficult to do if you designed around stack control but didn't have one.   

Another part is they only are enjoyable to a narrow band of players.  Even though they were mandatory in EQ, (and really powerful) you had a very small segment of players running them.   Even smaller than the oft-groused-about Tank and Healer shortage in other DIKUs.  They require thought and creativity to fully utilize their power, so is it any surprise they're not as widely-played as the easy gratification of "BIG NUMBARS" DPS classes?

It's disappointing that other games haven't included them, but not too surprising.

There's several of us.  I loved the Dark Defender power sets.  Once power customization came in, I could keep the effects while changing the looks and theme which just made me even happier.

And Superjump.

Damn, I'm sad now.

One reason not a lot of people play the support characters in Most MMO is because they are pure heal bitches whose sole job is to play the green bar mini game. In COH some "support" like darkness actually was mostly offensive with lots of debuffing/controls. Unless you chose a more pure healer type defender/controller you never needed to play the mini bar game. You did your thing and by doing your thing you boosted the survivability of your group.

I cannot recall another MMO that really had non healer support classes that could obviate the need for having a healer in the group. Some had things like bards but having one did not replace the need for a healer which limited their usefulness.

I play support/control almost exclusively, in all games (back in WOW vanilla, I liked juggling three and a half different CCs at the same time with my warlock). In COH my main was originally an ill/rad controller, then later a rad/sonic defender. In COH the basic grouping dynamic was "get enough debuffs / buffs", everything else was secondary. Doing task forces with all-defender and/or controller groups was pretty amusing (and effective), as all sub-EB/AV mobs were permanently held and EB/AVs were debuffed to uselessness and reduced to beating on invulnerable pets or super-buffed players.

Even though I played off and on since launch, my favorite thing in COH was the Mission Architect from 2009 on. It was a damn solid system for player-created content in MMOs, and that stuff has appealed to me ever since my MUD builder / GM days in the 90s. In fact, I don't think any other game on the market with a similar system (sto foundry, eq2 dungeon creation are the two I know about) comes close to the MA's capabilities.

I also loved CoH support characters. My main (and only 50) was a Kinetic Defender; debuffing mobs, buffing the group and giving everyone Super Jump was a blast. I very rarely had to use my heal because the debuffs were so good. I also had an Ice Controller who was fun because I didn't use stuns; I used Ice Slick and Arctic Air so the mobs would alternate between attacking one another and falling on their asses.

It was a game from an era when combat didn't have to be carefully calibrated for a positive gaming experience. They'd throw hordes of mobs at a full team, with the same powers the players had, and dealing with it was your problem. It was chaotic, epic and fun.. and sometimes you'd just get your asses kicked. But it couldn't be tuned to be progression content in way WoW made standard.

That's partly why meaningful CC, let alone something on the CoH level, doesn't happen anymore. It's so powerful in the hands of skilled players (as it was in EQ) that it makes it impossible to balance the challenge for poor players or parties without CC.

I just adored my Storm Defender. She was a self-propelled buff-bunker. Once my regular group all quit, though, she was unplayable solo. I made her on day one of live service - which for me meant the pre-start. I watched the servers close logged in with her. In eight years, she only reached level 31.

There was so much of that game I just never had a chance to see...

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal?

Numbers on blasters, scrappers vs controllers?  Numbers on enchanters vs. other classes?  Yes, control is popular among this group but I thought we realized that this forums demographics are way off the norm.

I absolutely adore 'aggressive' support characters, meaning characters with abilities that help my team while I can stay focused on the enemies.  My most played characters included:

Gravity/Kinetic Controller
Earth/Storm Controller
Illusion/Radiation Controller (see a theme?  :grin:)
Mind Control/Fire Assault Dominator
Ice/Dark Corruptor (which had comparable control to a Controller/Dominator)

No other game that I've played has had that kind of playstyle, which is a damned shame.  So Gothika, Terra Firma, Marionette, Fantasia and Iceblink will always have a special place in my heart.  I won't say RIP because as far as I'm concerned, they're all still off doing their thing in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles even though I can't log into the servers anymore.  They certainly can't be defeated by a mere server shutdown.  :heart:

I had a robots/forcefield mastermind, and it felt almost like cheating.  Not only was I throwing forcefields on everyone, my protector bots were also throwing forcefields on everyone, and they stacked.  On top of making my entire team vastly harder to hurt, I was pouring robots into a room and OMG LASERS.  The only downside is that there wasn't much for me to personally do in fights; my attack powers were weak and primarily just to knock down anything that tried to run up and kill me so my robots could then laser it to death.

MMs were pretty ridiculously overpowered in basically every facet of PVE. What's kind of amazing is that for the most part they just let that be.

They weren't so hot on TFs/SFs, though.

Fire/rad controller and rad/rad defender. Love debuffers.

I loathed MMs. They were fun enough alone, but the first time you were in a group with three or four of them, the masses of minions just got insane.

The only downside for my mastermind Mrs. Roboto was that her babies were REALLY NOISY.

KLANG KLANG KLANG KLANG KLANG

My highest level character was Ghost Blossom the martial arts/whatever the hell the tree with all the regen shit was scrapper, I think she was 38 or 39. I got a fair number of characters into the 30's, then the fun would drop off considerably and I'd start someone new.


I'm mad at myself for forgetting to log in and screenshot some of my heroes.

MMs were really bad in incarnate trials. 'Last Sheriff' (therm/thugs) and his buddies 'Good/Bad/Ugly', 'Butch Cassidy/Sundance Kid' and 'Wyatt Earp' just stuck to regular groups and soloing and did fine, though.  :awesome_for_real:

e: Doom Metal (rad/sonic defender) was where it was at, though. Pop AM so everyone was happy, maybe put on some debuffs, and bring on the pew pew. I even used the ghost slayer battle axe for the requisite METAL FACTOR, Brütal Legend-style (wish it could be reskinned to a guitar, but ah well) as well as Total Focus (long-ass animation melee attack) from the energy epic power pool. And no, I didn't have the PBAOE heal on autocast. :p

So who is going to make the next CoH I wonder.

They were utterly hilarious in PvP, though. I ran a Thug/Poison MM for a while (she got grandfathered to another server before they upped the per-server char limit) who basically preyed on Blasters, but most anyone was a valid target. Pink insps were a must-have, though, cause it was really easy to screw an MM over with teleport foe.

Beautiful.  :cry:

Nobody? I mean, if your MMO died while Vanguard (for example) is still going then it's not exactly making a good case for a follow-up.

NCsoft's decision, though, was unusual. The game was making them money (albeit not a lot). Shutting down MMOs like Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa made sense, but not for CoH.

I would go so far as to say it almost certainly was making more money than, say, Warhammer Online or some of SOE's malingerers.

You all know I am broken, so no one is gonna be surprised when I'll say that I was in love with Auto Assault and I miss it a lot. It was our only shot at Car Wars/Auto Duel in this century, and they killed it and it's never gonna happen again. Sorry for the derail.

Aren't we past apologizing for derails? :-)

I did enjoy Auto Assault a lot. Until they bolted on the avatard portion  :mob:

Driving games of that type that aren't in first person and let you drive around in reverse with no disadvantages are fundamentally broken, IMO, since you just drive around in reverse while shooting your main front facing guns at all the things that are chasing you. Same issue with first/3rd-person shooters that have lots of melee range enemies and let you move backwards with no speed penalty.

I  :heart:ed Auto Assault, unironically. I didn't really want real driving mechanics, that probably would have made me like it less.

I really liked Tabula Rasa.

That said, some of the best times I ever had in any game were spent providing cover (and one time falling asleep in the middle of a raid with) my favorite enchanter in EQ. He made even the toughest trinity encounters trivial with his CC skills.

I liked Tabula Rasa too, and loved watching enchanters do their thing in EQ... especially since I was a cleric (crack please!).

EQ, CoH... all games from an earlier age. And even though EQ is still running, I think, it's not remotely the same game.

That is nonsense. Dark Wind is still going and it's far closer than AA ever was.

Dark Wind is GREAT. And that is true Car Wars, absolutely. Let's say I just wanted more. More production value and more content. But yes you are right, I even gave him (Sam) money a few years ago. Dark Wind just feels last century, and Auto Assault, while more silly, felt like Autoduel Online 2004 edition.

I liked Auto Assault as well, although a big part of that was the fact I could drive a giant hot pink van.

Yea. Most of my love for AA comes from the E3 demo time I had with it, not the shipped product. At that early point it was just fighting and destructable environments with all related mayhem.

Even after COH is gone, the character creator lives on! (http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,7288.0.html) I wonder if they're working on an emu too -- and if so, how far they've gotten.

S.E.G.S. is the closest thing right now.
http://segs.nemerle.eu/forumz/ (http://segs.nemerle.eu/forumz/)

IIRC someone said (maybe pohsyb) that CoX has never been emulated because its source/server code was never leaked.

Emulators don't use leaked source code, they just re-engineer via packet sniffing.

Yep. As I remember from the heady days of UO emus (early 2000s), basically everyone just reused the client assets, reverse-engineered the protocol, and rolled their own server based on the coder/group's Vision™. Sphere was waaaay different from UOX in just about every way, some emus used custom clients while others used stock clients / run-time patchers, etc.

(POL 4 lyfe!)

My favorite server emulation related thing was Ragnarok Online.

Gravity, the company that made Ragnarok Online literally put all of their server binaries on the same unpatched Win2k box they used to serve up the client. People discovered this, downloaded the server software, and upon looking at it realized it was a horrific piece of shit. The server emulators created reverse engineering their stuff ended up being much better than the actual server software Gravity used itself!

You should check in on the Titan Network, but I believe the priority of that community has shifted from creating an emu to creating a new MMO in the spirit of CoH/V.

I believe that CoH/V was particularly hard to emulate, but a lot of progress was made in the last two months before closure.

There's a difference between what the community banded together to work on, and what Titan's devs might be doing.

The community is full of passionate folks who love CoH, with as you can imagine a wide variety of professional backgrounds in real life. So they have lots of hands, but debatable how many of those hands are devs, let alone devs with any heavy game development background or knowledge. Mostly it seems like what devs they have come from whatever background their job happens to be, and they just picked up a game platform like Unity to try using. I've never seen anything approaching a quality commercial look-and-feel MMO from that sort of thing.

There's differing opinions on how far those community-driven projects will get, but a group of well-intentioned but randomly scattered skillsets expecting to craft a full-blown MMO is interesting to watch.

Titan's devs are ... devs. Good ones too, from what I've seen over time.

The community have two things going on: The Phoenix Project and Heroes and Villains (both are new code and content, with H&V supposedly being more similar in gameplay to CoH, and Phoenix being more of a CoH2-ish modern engine to build many superhero games on). Neither are Titan projects, who have their own ideas on what to work on. Titan just helps host subforums for them until they get their own sites rolling.

There is supposed to be some teaser about the community efforts due already (Dec 14 iirc).

EDIT: So the teaser (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebd0Zup85os) is just a series of concept drawings from different people. I'd have thought a first teaser would at least have a model or environment render, just to show everyone the team has the knowledge and tools to make them. And lets face it, for any commercial game team doing that would be easy.

I totally agree about the Titan Network projects. They've got a few talented programmers / coders who were good at creating some community tools but it's uncertain how long they'll invest into a massive project like working on an emulator / a completely new MMO for gratis in their spare time.

And then it's got people who are all, "I want to help, so I'm going to learn Maya and Unity this weekend and I'll be animating all our models next week!".

There are a lot of strong personalities on the site and I think there will be a fracturing or two of the community before those projects enter indefinite hiatus. Odds of success are very, very slim.

I'm confused. Is this Titan thing you guys are talking about Blizzard's Next Big Thing (tm), or some other Titan?

Titan Network (http://cohtitan.com/). They maintain the CoH wiki and a number of utilities, including the character planner that I spent almost as much time playing with as the actual game.