CoH to be shut down

[Morat20]

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

[MahrinSkel]

Escrima sticks if I don't miss my guess.

--Dave

[Trippy]

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

[Redgiant]

Also, I'll leave this here:

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

And someone wanted me to say:

This is a composite video featuring all the heroes of the players who showed up in a sign of support for Paragon Studios and CoH last weekend. It may not change anything, but it was done for all the devs, past and present as a thank you, as much as anything. So this is for you, pohsyb.

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?

[pohsyb]

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?

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.

[Mortriden]

I'm a programmer, not a fortune-teller. 

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. 

[Dren]

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.

[Scold]

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.

[pohsyb]

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.

CoH preceded WoW.

[UnSub]

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?

[Redgiant]

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.

[pohsyb]

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?

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.

[pohsyb]

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

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.

[Ingmar]

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

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.

[Mattemeo]

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.

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.

[Scold]

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.

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?

[koro]

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

[Trippy]

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.

[pohsyb]

My question is: who developed Super Jump?

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.

[Mattemeo]

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.

[Sjofn]

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.

[pohsyb]

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.

[Ingmar]

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.

[Trippy]

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

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

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

[Goreschach]

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.

[Zetor]

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

[Stormwaltz]

Super Jump was the best.

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

[Koyasha]

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.

[Kageru]

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

[Andy_Mythic]

What's happening in here ... 

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

[CmdrSlack]

Super Jump was the best.

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

This forever.

[Andy_Mythic]

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

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.

[Ragnoros]

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...

[UnSub]

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.

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".

[Mattemeo]

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