CoH to be shut down

[Sjofn]

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.

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.

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

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.

[Zetor]

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.

[Numtini]

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.

[UnSub]

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.

[Xanthippe]

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.

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.

[eldaec]

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.

[Ingmar]

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.

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.

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.

[ezrast]

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.

[eldaec]

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.

[Ingmar]

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).

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.

[eldaec]

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

At higher levels loot became a thing.

[ezrast]

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.

[Ingmar]

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.

[Rendakor]

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.

[Kageru]

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.

[Zetor]

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.

[Jimbo]

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.

[Zetor]

Not that online protests and petitions have ever accomplished anything (or have any chance of accomplishing anything), but there's an ingame rally 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.

[Sheepherder]

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.

[Venkman]

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.

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 :)

[Rendakor]

Rift gives you a limit set of abilities?  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).

[UnSub]

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.

[Mattemeo]

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.

[Sheepherder]

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.

[koro]

I wasn't aware Unreal Tournament was an MMO.

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

[Xanthippe]

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.

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

[cironian]

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.

[Amaron]

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.

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.

[Cheddar]

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).

[Ingmar]

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.

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

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

[pohsyb]

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

[Amaron]

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

Why did power customization take so long?

[pohsyb]

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).

[Minvaren]

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

Thanks for helping create some great memories.   

[koro]

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

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?