City of Heroes going F2P with Issue 21

[Tyrnan]

Sadly no. If it was it would make things a lot easier on the free/premium players with regards to teaming. But you don't need to be a VIP to do the DfB trial so there's hope that they'll add more non-VIP things to it in the future.

[ezrast]

The word of mouth has not been particularly positive. I did a search on twitter and about half were people bitching about the IOs.

If you were a player who spent the time and cash building up your IO'ed character, coming back to an un-IO'd one is returning to a nerfed character.

My hopes of seeing a second Paragon Studios game keep diminishing.

They've been listing job openings for work on a "next-gen MMO" for at least a year now, so here's hoping they get on that before City of Heroes fades too far into obscurity for NCSoft to keep them around. I feel like if the CoH team weren't yoked to the terribly dated CoH engine and seven years of wonky design decisions, they could make a better MMO than just about anybody currently out there except maybe Arena.net. Also with incredibly high potential for disappointment, of course.

[UnSub]

Yeah, it would seem that Paragon Studios has been working on another title since at least the start of 2010, and probably earlier.

However, that was before Going Rogue launched and didn't do anything to arrest the slide in player exits and before a group of Paragon devs were retrenched. And now a launch into F2P that might be a fizzer.

Of course, the interesting thing about NCsoft games is that they release revenue figures quarterly, so in a few months we should be able to see what happened at the launch of F2P.

[Dren]

From the viewpoint of somebody that actually did try CoH out through their new F2P system?  They waited way too long.  The quality of competing F2P games out there now is far far better than CoH now.  Yes, CoH may have a much better endgame and a deeper veteran player experience, but I couldn't get past the initial shock of how poorly the game has aged.  I had the same reaction and speed to uninstall as when I tried Shadowbane again during their brief F2P attempt.

[SurfD]

I kind of have to agree.  Compared to some other games, it really hasnt aged very well.   I mean, If you compare WoW to CoH, WoW's basic world has had some fairly signifigant graphical upgrades.  Vanilla WoW and Current WoW may still have the same polygon count on most shit, but the visual engine (lighting, water, textures etc) got afairly decent overhaul, and it is still pretty nice to look at.   

Comparatively, CoH just looks fairly bland for 90% of the world at large.  Sure, your superhero looks awesome, and I am pretty sure that they updated a lot of the NPC models (I dont remember the Circle of Thorns mages looking quite as awesome as they do now), but the textures on the buildings / grass / rocks etc for everything in the world just look like ass by modern standards.

[Ingmar]

You can turn on some kind of super-mega-bloom effect that makes it all look slightly better. If you don't hate bloom, that is.

[proudft]

I poked my head in, the lack of IOs for Freeplay is sort of a pisser.

[UnSub]

CoH/V has had graphical upgrades, with the most recent one being with Going Rogue last year.

However, this does nothing to put polish on the early starting zones of CoH, which still look very basic, especially compared to the more recently designed areas.

Paragon Studios have been clear that they won't be revamping older zones because it isn't worth the investment in their minds, but this has been a short-sighted strategy because players get access to the new tutorial / Going Rogue zones, only to be dumped into a zone that was built in 2003.

[Trippy]

Some of the original zones like Atlas Park have been redone for the new Issue.

[SurfD]

I dont know, most of the environment textures still look like ass to me.

[Kageru]

I think it's not a bad call. A full re-design of all their zones would be a massive investment probably better invested in new gameplay. The only difference being less ass character models, but I'm beginning to wonder if that interacts with all the costume pieces they have and is a lot more work than it seems.

I don't personally find the zone design too bad though. It's fairly clean and not having too much random decoration probably helps make it a bit more tolerant of older machines. Big city zones are pretty infamously laggy.

[Amaron]

The only difference being less ass character models, but I'm beginning to wonder if that interacts with all the costume pieces they have and is a lot more work than it seems.

A lot of those costume pieces look like ass due to the shader support.   It would be a fair amount of coding work to add but it would allow them to make a lot of improvements with limited artist time.   Applying materials to already made objects is not a huge amount of work.

[Phred]

I logged in early last week while the free2play was appearantly still in beta and it's fucked up my characters majorly. First time I logged in I unlocked a server and 2 character slots but now when I log in the server is unlocked but all the characters are locked again and there are no unlock points left. Grr. From my brief play session earlier I'm not sure I want to even put out the effort to put in a support ticket. As others have said this game has not aged particularly well. I can ignore graphics but I find the game play mechanics so ancient as to be completely annoying.

[SurfD]

For anyone who is actually playing: Are you having problems with the game just randomly locking up?

Seems that (at least for me) the game is not super stable.  I can be playing along perfectly fine and then boom, game hardlocks, and i have to CTRL ALT DEL to shut it down.  At least firing it up and logging back in is sufficiently fast that i dont miss anything, and it does not kick me out of groups or whatnot.

Cant really find a cause for it either.  Vid drivers up to date, not running it on any settings that would make it unstable, and my PC is FAR above min spec to run it.  Seems to happen most frequently when i am zoning out of a mission i just finished, but has also happened while just randomly running down the street too.

[Zetor]

Do you have an ATI card? (if not, disregard this post)

I had this problem with the 11.8 catalyst drivers. I upgraded to 11.9 and haven't had any problems since. If it comes to that, you can try downgrading to 11.3 or 11.4 (that's what I did before 11.9 came out), but that's obviously not a long-term solution.

[Scold]

I play Champions free-to-play, and I like it. It's fast-paced, twitchy, and I can take on twenty bad guys at once. I've made two cash shop purchases so far, for the Specialist (dual pistols and dual swords sounded fun) and a Penthouse apartment (being able to super-leap out of my apartment into the city below sounded fun).

The game is completely imbalanced, and that's okay.  I can teleport through any situations I don't want to fight through.  I have a super-powerful PBAOE that absorbs nearly all incoming damage, and a super-powerful AOE ranged attack that hits everything in a large cone around me. Both look really cool. At some point they'll add the mecha powerset (power armor) for free-to-play players, and I'll spend money on that too.

Is there any reason for me to start up City of Heroes and give it a go?

I have a wonderful job and other fun hobbies, I'll never participate in content that requires me to stick with it for over an hour at a time or start over from the beginning. I have zero interest in repetitive grinding.  Does free-to-play COH offer me something that Champions doesn't?

[Amaron]

Is there any reason for me to start up City of Heroes and give it a go?

CoH does have some good points that ChampO lacks.   The combat is really slow in comparison though and the graphics are pretty old.   If you like ChampO already I doubt you'd find CoH to be better.

[SurfD]

Does free-to-play COH offer me something that Champions doesn't?

With how heavily locked down the complete beginner F2P version of CoH is, probably not, unless you just want to mess around and try out the combat system.  If it wasnt for the fact that the 6 months worth of payed time i had banked from 5 years ago bumped me up to tier 5 unlocks for my now F2P account, I probably wouldnt enjoy it enough to go back to.

[Scold]

Does free-to-play COH offer me something that Champions doesn't?

With how heavily locked down the complete beginner F2P version of CoH is, probably not, unless you just want to mess around and try out the combat system.  If it wasnt for the fact that the 6 months worth of payed time i had banked from 5 years ago bumped me up to tier 5 unlocks for my now F2P account, I probably wouldnt enjoy it enough to go back to.

Pretty sure I subbed for 6-9 months back when the game first launched. Made it up to level 25 or so on a character I probably wouldn't want anymore. Would that help me?

[koro]

Does free-to-play COH offer me something that Champions doesn't?

With how heavily locked down the complete beginner F2P version of CoH is, probably not, unless you just want to mess around and try out the combat system.  If it wasnt for the fact that the 6 months worth of payed time i had banked from 5 years ago bumped me up to tier 5 unlocks for my now F2P account, I probably wouldnt enjoy it enough to go back to.

Pretty sure I subbed for 6-9 months back when the game first launched. Made it up to level 25 or so on a character I probably wouldn't want anymore. Would that help me?

Yep, it would help quite a bit.

[Numtini]

I'd say COH is far better than CO. Like night and day. But the F2P version is a joke and I wouldn't bother.

[SurfD]

Does free-to-play COH offer me something that Champions doesn't?

With how heavily locked down the complete beginner F2P version of CoH is, probably not, unless you just want to mess around and try out the combat system.  If it wasnt for the fact that the 6 months worth of payed time i had banked from 5 years ago bumped me up to tier 5 unlocks for my now F2P account, I probably wouldnt enjoy it enough to go back to.

Pretty sure I subbed for 6-9 months back when the game first launched. Made it up to level 25 or so on a character I probably wouldn't want anymore. Would that help me?

If you can remember your old account details, then that account should get grandfathered into the new Rewards system for your "payed time".  You will pro end up with enough reward tokens to hit Tier 5, which ulnocks a bunch of goodies.

[Valmorian]

I'd say COH is far better than CO. Like night and day. But the F2P version is a joke and I wouldn't bother.

The F2P version of COH?  Really?  I didn't notice all that much difference between F2P and Subscription with that game.

[SurfD]

I'd say COH is far better than CO. Like night and day. But the F2P version is a joke and I wouldn't bother.

The F2P version of COH?  Really?  I didn't notice all that much difference between F2P and Subscription with that game.

If you start out with a brand new, never before played, F2P account on CoH, you are highly limited to what you have access to. 
You are locked out of the following:
Can not send Mail
Can not send Whispers / Tells
Can not Join Super Groups (guilds)
Can not Trade with other players.
No access to the Broadcast or Global chat channels (meaning the Help channel has become the go to channel for F2P player communication)
No access to ANY of the Mission Archetect functionality (cant build missions, cant play missions by other people)
Limited access to the Auction system (i think you can buy stuff, but cant post anything)
And possibly a few others i am missing.

All in all, unless you pay enough through the store or by subbing to VIP status for a few months, a very basic level account is fairly crippled in what it can and can not do. 

[Kageru]

Some of that is a continuation of restrictions on trial accounts put in place to stop gold spam, specifically the tells, mails and broadcasts. Though I did see someone on the forums point out being able to respond to tells would be good, but that's new code. As soon as you put a couple of dollars into the game quite a few of those vanish.

[Zetor]

Yeah, a $5 one-time investment eliminates about 3/4 of that list, and a further $30-ish investment eliminates most of the rest (and at that point we're at "game box price" territory). IMO coh's freemium implementation is better than most other ex-sub MMOs, including LOTRO (which seems to be praised around here).

The biggest issue according to most of my guildies (and this thread) is that the only ways to get access to IOs and the enhancement invention system are:
- paying a sub (VIP)
- buying an invention license each month for 160 points ($2); this is a really minimal fee, but the fact that you have to pay a monthly fee for a 'free' game is probably a red flag for a lot of players
- having tier 7 veteran rewards to unlock the system permanently, which requires you to have 27 reward tokens total; you get one token to start, another if you have a retail code, one for each 3 vet months, one for each vet year, one token for each month of VIP and one for each ~$12-15 (depending on discounts) you buy at the store. That means (25-x/3-x/12) months of sub where x is the total number of veteran months you had on your account before... that's over five years of veteran status or 2 years of sub for a new player! For example, there are only two people in my guild who had enough veteran months for this option to be realistically accessible in the near future. You can also get more reward tokens by buying stuff in the store, but if you look at it that way you'll see "Oh I have to pay (100+)$ to unlock inventions? Screw that!"

Even though you don't *need* IOs to do anything in the game and can use a secondary build to set up a SO-only build, for most 'old' players it's become an integral part of the character building process -- suddenly losing access to them* is a pretty big deal.


* rationally, a premium player is not "losing access" to anything, since they weren't able to play the game at all without paying a sub before... but this is the player perception

[Lantyssa]

Maybe they'll tweak it.  Overall the system is pretty well designed, though extremely complicated so it's tough to grasp.  If they start allowing IOs but no set bonus, I bet people feel perceive it as a great change.  Once slotted with them, IOs feel like a requirement.  The bonus is just that, though.

[PalmTrees]

I'd been maintaining a sub, so I had pretty much everything except the last tier unlocked when they switched. If I had lost access to IOs, ... probably would've quit. The min/maxing is fun and is really the only thing to do with your max level char besides incarnate trials. IOs really should've been an earlier unlock.

[UnSub]

Some of that is a continuation of restrictions on trial accounts put in place to stop gold spam, specifically the tells, mails and broadcasts. Though I did see someone on the forums point out being able to respond to tells would be good, but that's new code. As soon as you put a couple of dollars into the game quite a few of those vanish.

The calls for trial accounts to be able to respond to tells has been going on since the trials launched with these ridiculous restrictions. I've no doubt it helped turn people away from CoH/V by making it hard for two (or more) players trialling the game to link up.

Yes, the restrictions are similar to what WoW uses, but CoH/V isn't WoW in terms of the player base size. And it did little to restrict gold spam anyway.

[Numtini]

I doubt if there will be any changes. The whole F2P system seemed to me to show a real lack of faith in the F2P model. The mini-subscriptions for auction house and IO use. It just seemed like they weren't willing to fully commit.

[Scold]

I'd say COH is far better than CO. Like night and day. But the F2P version is a joke and I wouldn't bother.

I hear a fair number of people saying this. But could you elaborate a bit?  Combat in both games seems really simplistic, but CO's feels faster paced and more fun, and more suited to taking on large piles of baddies all at once.  I'm comparing CO vs CoH at launch here since that's what I played, so if things have changed let me know, but CO has more comic-booky graphics and fun cut-scenes with gleefully cheesy writing. CO has interesting powersets like power armor or telekinetic blades that I don't remember CoH having. The 'Crisis' areas you work through as you level up in CO that introduce you to each zone before you 'stop the crisis' and enter the real zone are a really fun touch. I like how you can control the speed of your leveling too, just beating missions 5 levels above you if you're sick of your current area and you want to move on.  The weekly comic book episodic content releases are really fun, too.  What does CoH have that trumps all of this in your eyes?

[UnSub]

CoH/V has years worth of content, the Archetypes fit together much better than the freeform power systems generally allows and I think CoH/V has better lore.

But I do find CoH/V too slow to play anymore. I got 5 years out of it, and that's enough.

[Zetor]

Just off the top of my head, COH has
- Very varied player archetypes: there are typical melee/range pew pew ATs and the holy trinity is there if you look really hard. OTOH there is also an 'RTS-lite' pet class (mastermind, controlling 6+ pets with different powers at one time), and you can basically compose any kind of group you want for the content and make it work; no need for a dedicated tank or healer (defenders are NOT healers). You also have multiple builds per character, making you even more versatile (my warshade can basically do everything except support).
- COH also has an insane amount of powersets by now (primary, secondary) that are also customizable; you can set their colors and (in case of weapon-based powersets) weapon looks.
- Completely dynamic grouping with super-sidekicking, ie. you can group with your level 50 friends at level 4 without problems and vice versa.
- Scaling difficulty from 'I want to fight small amounts of wimpy mobs 1 level below me' to 'I want to fight tons of mobs 4 levels above me' (I'm not sure how CO works here).
- Massive bucketloads of content, you'd need at least 7-8 characters going from 1-50 (each of them playing different content) to experience it all. This also really helps if you're rolling alts and don't have to run the same missions in canada or the desert again (and in COH, you're rolling a LOT of alts).
- Hundreds of thousands (!) of player-created story arcs adding to the massive bucketloads of content... a lot of them are quite good / better than 'normal' content, and I'm not just saying this because I happen to have a Dev's Choice story arc myself. :P
- An involved power invention system where you can make your character crazy powerful to enable the aforementioned 'fighting tons of mobs 4 levels above me' feeling.
- No loot, no fighting over loot; power enhancements and invention components drop for everyone and you always get stuff you can use (even if you're sidekicking / examplaring).
- Still the best character customization 'tech' on the market.
- Incarnate system -- it's ok if you really want to play WOW-lite at 50. Personally I don't like it, but a lot of people do.
- Player versus play-- actually forget about this one, pvp in COH is terrible.

CO was... completely meh for me. The block mechanic annoyed me to no end, and I didn't find the quests/lore/enemies inspiring at all.

[Scold]

See, I get excited about CoH power sets when I see them on a list. For example, the new "Street Justice" gritty brawler powerset sounds fun, on paper.  But then I look at a YouTube video of the powers in action, and CoH combat just puts me to sleep.  So slow, so bland. The mission architect stuff does sound fun, though I imagine CO will be getting that soon, too.

I'm curious what you didn't like about the Block mechanic?  It's one of my favorite parts of the combat system, and makes me feel much more in control of the flow of things, especially when combined with the comic-speech-bubbles attacks.

[Amaron]

I tried playing it again but god it's so slow.  Even if you have ridiculously pimped out recharge via IO's/hasten/etc it's so slow.   The animations just feel like molasses.   I could read a book in-between key presses.   There's a lot of great stuff in the game still but it's all kind of pointless without interesting combat.