Champions Online Salutes City of Heroes

[Starsman]

Yeah, you can't see the whole population when it's crowded. The way to tell is on your mini map, it'll tell you what instance of a zone you're in. You can click there to switch and see how many there are total. I wasn't on over the weekend, but even on weeknights after 10 PM EST it's not uncommon to see 6 or more Ren Center's at a time. I've played at some really unusual hours and I don't think I've ever been in a que for an alert for more than 2 minutes, and 2 minutes is pushing it.

All that being said, I don't *think* that CO has COH's level of population. But I would say that it's far from unhealthy or underpopulated.

Most of the community may be on the high end of the game. I see lots of people, but still have a hard time coming across players actually playing at my level range. When I went through the tutorial last Saturday I only bumped into 2 people and had to solo the big gun event.

But yea, if I look only at zone chat, it seem the game is VERY active. Barely able to keep up with the chatter IF I stand still and do nothing but read

[Starsman]

If CO is where we're stuck for a cape fix (DCUO doesnt count) then I hope they get a couple more devs after Neverwinter gets canceled comes out!

My hope is the influx of players makes them think it may be worthwile sinking some more dev power into the game... does the game really have only less than 3 devs working on it right now???

[JRVthatsME]

If cryptic does decide that it would be worth adding a few more dev to Champions Online then it would be a smart move to put people who used to work in Paragon Studios on it seeing as how they have many years of superheros mmo experience.

[Septipheran]

When I was on Sunday night into Monday morning I seem to recall seeing Millennium City going up over 10 instances with 60-98 people in each one.  Mind you, Vibora Bay, Monster Island, and Lemuria were all rather empty and I didn't really pay attention or see any of the other zones (I think I was in Canada briefly, but I don't recall how it was faring).  I've never done an Alert, so I don't know about those.

I'm not entirely sure about this, but I think maybe the instance counts for players in zone go by neighborhood. So for instance (no pun intended,) when you see x amount of players in Ren Center with 60 players in each, I think it could just mean that's the amount of players in that neighborhood alone, not in the entire Millennium City zone.

[Kaos Arcanna]

I am enjoying Champions Online.

Most of the stories I've done so far are very tongue in cheek, but that matches my sense of humor.

The costume creator is pretty robust. You can make things in it that you could never make in COX. Last night, I saw a player whose character looked like a giant insect ... in a way that you could never create in COX.

My favorite characters in COH were ELEC/ELEC melee ... a Scrapper and a Brute. In CO there is no Electric Melee, but I've been able to build a ranged toon that feels nearly as hard to kill as my Brute ever was. And the Electric Animations in CO are pretty cool.

Freeform allows you to create concepts impossible in COH.

It's a fairly easy game to solo.

It's not perfect, though.

Teaming is ... awkward. Leveling slows down DRASTICALLY doing regular missions when you team. When you share a mission so everyone can do it , you keep that mission once the team breaks up unless you abandon it.

The graphics are fairly cartoony. Really, I find a certain charm to them, now, but they do take some getting used to.

There are bugs that I wouldn't expect to find in a game that's as old as CO is.

It's not COX. If you go into CO expecting a COX experience, you are going to be disappointed.

But if you judge it by its own merits and criticize it for its own faults, then I think it's a fun game to play.

[Thunder Glove]

I'm pretty sure that teaming in CO slows down your leveling because it looks like you get experience only for what percentage of damage you inflict on each enemy (unlike CoH where everyone in the team gets full experience from each enemy defeated).  That means the experience is divided between the damage-dealers, and primarily-support characters pretty much get no experience at all.

[Septipheran]

I'm pretty sure that teaming in CO slows down your leveling because it looks like you get experience only for what percentage of damage you inflict on each enemy (unlike CoH where everyone in the team gets full experience from each enemy defeated).  That means the experience is divided between the damage-dealers, and primarily-support characters pretty much get no experience at all.

I can't comment on whether this is true or not- It very well could be- But you're forgetting about a couple of things. If you're doing alerts, most of the XP is coming from the loot at the end. If you're doing regular missions, quite a lot of the XP comes from handing in the mission to a contact.

I haven't done much mission teaming, but I did spend a couple of hours running through some missions starting around level 10 with a couple of friends. The character I was playing was actually a healing/DPS free form, with just about equal time spent doing both. We were playing on Very Hard, and my experience rate was much higher than it had been solo- So once again, even if you're right, the increased clearing speeds + mission complete speed + ability to turn the difficulty up can all lead to a faster leveling rate in my experience.

[Kistulot]

Teaming once you've been through a crisis, to me, has felt like it levels you much quicker. Besides that there seems to be an XP bonus for teams like there was in CoH, the few missions with shared objectives (ugh, I miss the no bear butts from CoH! Sure we had to trek through zones sometimes to find the right mobs, but when we killed them, the right loot didnt need to drop!) go a lot faster, as do the kill skuls style of missions.

[dwturducken]

I found the teaming to be disappointing. Three of us teamed in the tutorial, and one of us did not appear to be in the same instance. We could not figure out how to "correct' that, so we ended up quitting and moving over to Borderlands (Steam). My experience has been that, in any game besides CoH, teaming varies from disappointing to pointless. DCUO's, for instance, is useless.

[Kaos Arcanna]

The first time I teamed I couldn't figure out how to change instance either, but now that I have it's rather simple.

On your minimap in the upper right hand corner, click where it says what instance you are currently in. You can then select the instance you want to transfer to.

A lot of the CO controls are counter-intuitive. On the other hand, there are some nice features.

[Septipheran]

The first time I teamed I couldn't figure out how to change instance either, but now that I have it's rather simple.

On your minimap in the upper right hand corner, click where it says what instance you are currently in. You can then select the instance you want to transfer to.

A lot of the CO controls are counter-intuitive. On the other hand, there are some nice features.

As for controls, when I first started I had an option to use "Super Hero style" controls, or something like that. I picked it as soon as I got in the game the first time and never looked back. It handles almost identically to COH for me.

[dwturducken]

I did like that feature a lot, but some things are still "WoW-ish," like your attack in slot one being on autofire unless you trigger another slot, I kept stopping it, because I thought you had to keep triggering it, too.

[thunderforce]

Besides that there seems to be an XP bonus for teams like there was in CoH, the few missions with shared objectives (ugh, I miss the no bear butts from CoH! Sure we had to trek through zones sometimes to find the right mobs, but when we killed them, the right loot didnt need to drop!) go a lot faster, as do the kill skuls style of missions.

Tell me there aren't bear butts to collect in CO? Bleah.

Mind you, Circle of Thorns in Kings Row when they all hid on skyscrapers at night? Circle of Thorns in Perez  when you're level 8 and they'll beat the snot out of you every time you stick your head into the forest? Anything in the old Faultline? It wasn't all skittles and beer in CoX at times.

[Kistulot]

Tell me there aren't bear butts to collect in CO? Bleah.

Sadly... yes.

They all make logical sense (nothing feels like shameless bear butts in the item itself, just the gameplay) and there is a higher use of inventory than CoH had in general (which is a plus or a negative, depending on who you ask!) but there are bear butts.

And given that its a superhero game, plenty of bare butts too.

What, you think the D had a monopoly on that? :p