City of Heroes going F2P with Issue 21

[Lantyssa]

Differences of opinion.  I find CoH combat the perfect speed.  CO felt... clunky.

[Minvaren]

Have to agree, I dig the pace of combat in CoH as well.  Makes things like MMs and Blappers both feasible and enjoyable.

I'm keeping CoX on the laptop in case I get bored somewhere away from home, but I can't see myself playing it regularly - especially with the restrictions on F2P.

[Zetor]

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.

C&P from the champions thread because I'm lazy :p

The actual combat gameplay felt extremely buttonmashy without playing like an action game / FPS. Kinda like combining the blah parts of a fighter game with a diku? The block mechanic itself was really annoying; when we were doing a mission with elite mobs, I pretty much did nothing but block 80% of the time and try to squeeze in some one-shot taunt blasts the rest of the time... it was either that or dying.

(f'ref, I played a power armor character and I was the 'tank' of our team)

[Ingmar]

Yeah blocking felt anti-fun to me. It had a kind of QTE feel to it. Now, if it had enabled special reactions, etc., that sort of thing, I think it would have felt more interactive, and maybe it does for some power sets. As it was it felt like something I was doing instead of using my powers, when what I wanted to be doing was zapping my electrical bullshit or whatever.

I'm sure it feels much more organic to a more tank-ish character than the one I was playing.

[Kageru]

Block is terrible because it's a all or nothing action that destroys game balance. Anything that seriously threatens a blocking character with support will one-shot an active character. It's more a side effect of CO's group dynamic being woeful. And while it has arcade style button spam most of the buttons do the same thing.

CoH is slow and boring from an action perspective but fun at a tactical level. So while the AoE attack is playing out you can decide what to do next. And with lots of AoE buffs and debuffs you need to think about your positioning or the flow of the battle. Of course that shows up a lot less solo with some of the more "pure" classes such as tanks or blasters, though even the blasters need to juggle their boosts a little bit.

I find my character (DP/Kinetics Corruptor) has to make quite a few decisions. Do I have enough targets in my AoE cone? Can I afford to be locked into the relatively long animation? Would getting a buff up be better? Even redraw, switching between weapons and non weapon powers, has a tactical element. In CO it was mostly waiting on cooldowns because there was very rarely any reason not to hit the most powerful attack.

That said my own revisit to CoH petered out fairly quickly. I don't think the novelty of being in a virtual world is making up for the often quite ordinary game-play. And I don't have the time or energy to invest to the point where I'd form social connections or see the end-game. Pretty much the same on messing around with Rift.

[Kitsune]

I fired my old robot/force field mastermind yesterday and  molten tears of joy streamed down my face when I noticed that casting a force field bubble automatically buffed everyone on my team instead of forcing me to keep track of everyone's shields.  That was a change that took too long to arrive.

[raydeen]

I finally found some time to give it a go and had forgotten how much I really love this game. I pulled my old rad/energy defender (Sylver Starr) out of mothballs and almost immediately got invited to a group. Took me a while to get my bearings again. I now know why I stopped playing the character as much though. She's not a great healer or damage dealer. I could have sworn I had a direct 1:1 heal but turns out my heal is just AoE. Which sucks when I have to shadow the tank and other members of the team decide to fight something else outside my range. Maybe it was just this one group but I seemed to remember players sticking fairly close together before instead of running willy nilly all over the place.

Next one out of the box will either be my blaster (Retro Rockette) or my controller (Star Kross).

Also noticed leveling was much faster and overall movement speed seemed faster as well. Feels good to be back in Paragon again.

[Zetor]

On my rad/sonic defender, the heal aura isn't really my focus. I hit it a few times if the group's taking aoe damage or someone's in danger of dying, sure -- but the other rad abilities are WAY better at keeping people alive. Radiation Infection massively nerfs an enemy group's tohit%, Enervating Field lowers their damage to acceptable levels, and Lingering Radiation slows their movement+attack speed. I actually use EMP Pulse a fair bit combined with a blue inspiration or two to quickly neutralize the offensive capabilities of an entire enemy group. Accelerate Metabolism is one of the best buffs in the game, and it works on your entire group! I also have the three Leadership toggles (assault/maneuvers/tactics) rolling all the time for more group supportage.

Of course finding good anchors (hardy mobs that'll outlast the first few AOEs from your group) for the first 2 abilities can be a challenge...

[Tyrnan]

Of course finding good anchors (hardy mobs that'll outlast the first few AOEs from your group) for the first 2 abilities can be a challenge...

And sometimes, finding groupmates that don't view the glow of your anchors as a giant "Kill me first!" sign can be equally challenging 

[Trippy]

If your teammates are killing so fast that your anchors don't stay up long enough to have an effect you didn't need to drop them in the first place -- i.e. if your team is steamrolling everything this is your chance to pewpewpew or whatever.

[Tyrnan]

That situation I don't actually mind and will happily join in the carnage. I was talking about situations where you'll get a few people on the team who will focus-fire your anchor down first for some strange reason, maybe because it glows a bit brighter? Although in fairness, it's been a long time since I played my Rad so maybe it's not as common now.

[Trippy]

Some players like to take down the biggest targets first. Scrappers, especially, do that a lot anchor or no anchor, since they higher crit chances against the bigger types. If you are on a team like that try anchoring on LTs or even Minions instead of Bosses.

[Zetor]

Yep, I typically anchor two mobs in a spawn, and target mobs near the back of the spawn (bosses if available, otherwise LTs). Scrapperlock / tunnel vision is real, but thankfully tends to go 'closest mob dies first'. Think of it as managing pet AI.

[Valmorian]

I know every character got the powers from the Fitness pool for free, but what I'm not sure about is what happened to the characters that took those powers as power picks?  Are they just missing some powers they would have normally been able to get but took the fitness powers at those levels?  Do you need to respec them to get those slots back?

[Trippy]

I know every character got the powers from the Fitness pool for free, but what I'm not sure about is what happened to the characters that took those powers as power picks?  Are they just missing some powers they would have normally been able to get but took the fitness powers at those levels?  Do you need to respec them to get those slots back?

You used to need to respec to get the slots back. Not sure if that's still true in Issue 21.

[Tyrnan]

All existing characters were granted a freespec when the changes went through, so assuming you haven't played the character since then you should still have it and can use it to pick alternate powers.

[Lantyssa]

Change your anchor color to something dark and dull.

[Furiously]

How do the two compare to DCUO?

[Kageru]

I'm pretty sure CO and DCUO are both console friendly, action RPG's. CoH is the odd one out in being old and old-school.

(Though I've not played DCUO because, well, it's a SOE game).

[Nebu]

How do the two compare to DCUO?

I think DCUO was faster paced and played more like a console game.  I enjoyed playing it for a month even with the wonky controls.  COH is much more MMO-like in terms of missions (quests) and character development.  COH plays at a slower pace.  I lasted a lot longer in COH before boredom set in, but it didn't have quite as much of the sheer 'fun' factor.

[Mattemeo]

How much more of the game is there now? I've had to 'upgrade' my old CoH Launcher to this lousy new NCSoft Hub thing and now after dicking about for 10 minutes it's foisting a 3gb download on me. 3gb on top of Going Rogue? WTF?

[Kitsune]

Most of the new content is raid-ish stuff for the incarnates at max level.  Lower level people probably won't see any difference.

[Kageru]

The going rogue expansion added an entirely new 1-20 leveling path which isn't bad. Making the fitness pool (speed, endurance and health recovery) an innate power also makes things a lot nice and faster at low levels. For old content I think they reworked the story progression a bit and make some changes to the hero noobie zone I didn't really notice.

[UnSub]

Is anyone playing this completely fresh as F2P, as in no veteran hours built up before?

I'm curious what the new F2P experience is like, particularly when you are limited to only the local and team chat channels (and help, I'm assuming, but I haven't seen that stated). However, I'm not "DL 3GB+" curious.

[Nevermore]

Oh come on, it'll be good practice for downloading SWTOR. 

[UnSub]

My download cap is less than 1.21 TORabytes, so I won't be downloading SWOR either. 

[koro]

Is anyone playing this completely fresh as F2P, as in no veteran hours built up before?

No, but I have played with people who came into the game with the old free trial restrictions on communication, which are the same as what people who go into the game now completely fresh have to deal with. Unless you love to do absolutely nothing but solo (and CoH is only really fun in as close to a full group as possible), it's just shy of unplayable unless you have friends who aren't under those restrictions ready to play with you. Even then, it's a major hassle. You can send them tells, but they can't respond; the only way to do any kind of remote communication is to either get them invited to a group or add them to your friends list and then use the /friend chat channel, which sends that message to every friend who's online. You can't trade them anything to help them out. You can't get them into your supergroup to get them any advice or help. You can't get them into any global channels.

There used to be buddy invite chains people would organize on the Penny-Arcade forums that would get people some 14-day trials where, if a person subscribed, the code issuer would get a free month of game time. This went on for quite a while, and some people even managed to accrue nearly a year of free time due to this, and it got a lot of people playing the game. When the baby-with-the-bathwater trial restrictions went in, people sticking around even for the 14 days ground to a complete halt.

It's probably been mentioned before in this thread, but those draconian trial restrictions (which address a problem that's since been fixed with better, more aggressive chat and in-game mail auto-filtering) are likely a lot of the reason CoH's subscriber numbers have been sinking further and further, and why the F2P switchover's gotten few people playing when these things tend to get a huge rush of people for at least a few months.

Edit: I remember one story of a couple who tried out the 14-day trial fresh not long after the original restrictions went in (back then you couldn't even access the Help channel). Naturally they wanted to play together, but they couldn't send each other tells and couldn't invite the other to a group. Since Friend-wide chat didn't exist yet, the only way they could communicate was via /local, and the only way they could group up to do anything was to go around populated areas and beg people to invite them to a group and make one of them the leader. It was a disgrace.

[UnSub]

Koro, I agree completely. The trial restrictions were ridiculous. I had friends I convinced to try the game, they'd log in to find themselves unable to get any help from other, or able to team up together (I wasn't in game at the time) and basically run around for 5 minutes, then quit.

And I agree - the trial turned players off from paying for the full game. However, existing players were happy with it, so the forums were very supportive of restrictive conditions around trials.

If the restrictions are being driven by an anti-RMT objective at this point for a F2P game, it's insane.

... looks like I'll have to sign up and give it a shot.

[koro]

However, existing players were happy with it, so the forums were very supportive of restrictive conditions around trials.

Not surprising. The CoH forums have always been a bastion of "fuck you, I got mine". Besides, it's not like those players who were on the free trials could post there and air their frustrations with the limitations anyway.

If the restrictions are being driven by an anti-RMT objective at this point for a F2P game, it's insane.

Nowadays it's probably less "anti-RMT spam" and more "something we can charge you to unlock". Though I imagine the players on the forums will still defend the restrictions to the death with the anti-RMT argument.

[UnSub]

Okay, so I created an entirely new account and started CoH/V as F2P.

The character creation system has been nicely revamped, even if Sister Psyche's boobs are very distracting. However, I tried to put a cape on my character without realising that capes are locked content - I couldn't continue, but thought that was because the game hadn't streamed enough info to let me through.

The new tutorial is kinda fun, if a bit short and the boss fight an odd addition to my CoH/V experiences. Giant Monsters certainly aren't meant to be taken in small groups after that point in the game.

In the game proper, the Help channel is being used as the default broadcast channel by the F2Pers since everyone gets it.

The new Atlas Park missions are short and have customised maps, so that's a nice change, even if it is still warehouses and caverns.

I plan to get my character out of the noob areas and then think about how the game presents itself to new players.

[Kageru]

In the game proper, the Help channel is being used as the default broadcast channel by the F2Pers since everyone gets it.

This was 100% inevitable.

[sinij]

Having chat channels, tells and trades locked down for F2Ps is peak of idiocy. These are core components, having them locked out is just all around bad idea.

[Lum]

Having chat channels, tells and trades locked down for F2Ps is peak of idiocy. These are core components, having them locked out is just all around bad idea.

Allowing gold farmers to use disposable accounts to spam users in chat channels/tells/trades is also an all around bad idea.

[UnSub]

Here's the thing though: CoH/V is now F2P. If a spammer wants to make an account, it's free (and was pretty cheap before hand, if your gold farmer was willing to commit credit card fraud to get an account and I'm sure that most did).

Instead, you are left with an early game that's crippled communication-wise for new players / trialists. CoH/V isn't (at least before Freedom launched) getting that many new players to pay up, which is an issue given Paragon Studios' claims that they have a 95% retention rate each month. If they were getting new players to pay up, they wouldn't have a revenue issue.

Plus Paragon Studios could just sell inf for $ now and compete head-to-head with the RMTers. Not saying they should, but they could.

[cironian]

Allowing gold farmers to use disposable accounts to spam users in chat channels/tells/trades is also an all around bad idea.

I agree that that's a valid concern. But the COH F2P launch went really overboard with locking down stuff that no one would even be able to abuse for spamming. Take the inability for free players to reply to tells or to send tells between people mutually friended. Those are blocked but only annoy legitimate new players without giving a benefit vs. spammers.

Given that they actually invested effort in renovating parts of the new player experience, giving this little thought to communication just seems strange.