City of Champions

[JaguarX]

They say, "oh, archetypes are a great way to learn the game and archetype characters are viable even at high levels."  The first claim is dubious, the second one is a flat-out lie.  I took a Glacier archetype and a Grimoire archetype to the level cap, and there was never a point where my Glacier was a more effective tank than a hybrid freeform.  My Grimoire character fared a little better due to my ability to jump into different roles as the team needed them, but more often than not I was only appreciated on teams where all the bases were already covered.

No archetype character will ever be central to a team where freeforms are present.  After a while playing an archetype, you hit a wall where there's no way to improve.  At that point, it's just not worth it to continue.

Yeah, sadly I think that is the point. If they did that, which I think they should, then they will be howls about free players getting to much for free.

I think the freeform slot is a bit steep, equivalent to 3 month subscribing I think, but if freeform was free, and all powers were free, and AT were on freeform level, then I think again, there will be howls about subscriptions being useless. I think CO problem is not enough features built in with F2P in mind. Naturally there should be some gate between free and someone who pay subscription but that requires features. In CO case, it's too restrictive.

Maybe one day games will find a balance. I think COX game away too much for free. A person that wasn't interested in Incarnate, MM or "what was that other AT that wasn't available for free? Dominator?" or didn't mind buying a slot here and there as they went, there was no point in the subscription. Someone like me, I didn't play doms nor MM much, didn't care about incarnates and if I wanted to save and not put anything into the game I could have and enjoyed it as if I never lost my subscription for free. But I wanted and was able to support $15 a month and more so it was no issue for me. But someone else with same boat and find something better to do with that $15 could have played and equally enjoyed themselves without putting a single penny to support the game's income.

[Xev]

Archetypes are for learning the game and farming Q. Anything else is bonus. The way I play the game, anyway.

I dunno what you define as viable at high levels but my Unleashed and even Mind toon are very welcome in Alerts, Gravi's, Blood Moon events, Forum Malvanum (w/Unleashed) events where I got 2 shields and the AF that everyone wanted, Fatal Error's, and anything else outside of a Lair on Elite and any other event that I'm not thinking of right now. I only excluded lairs because they are new to me and I haven't got a chance to try them in a team yet. My Marksman is shaping up nicely too,

Losing your FF toon by converting it to an AT when you stop paying your sub, sucks. No denying. I personally wouldn't consider it. If you stopped paying your sub to CoH, what happened? Yeah that sucked too, I never did it but I know what the penalties were.

CoH is CoH. CO is CO. Luv'em or leave'em. I have room for both. Both have strengths, both have weaknesses. One of CO's biggest strengths atm is you can play it.

[JaguarX]

CoH is CoH. CO is CO. Luv'em or leave'em. I have room for both. Both have strengths, both have weaknesses. One of CO's biggest strengths atm is you can play it.

Truth.

[MWRuger]

CoH is CoH. CO is CO. Luv'em or leave'em. I have room for both. Both have strengths, both have weaknesses. One of CO's biggest strengths atm is you can play it.

Yeah you right. I still wish it weren't so.

[MWRuger]

BTW, I don't hate this game. I'm playing right now. I've tried on off several times. I got a freakin' lifetime sub. I WANT it to be awesome. But it needs some devs to pay some attention to it. I hope that is what's happening. Time will tell I suppose.

It was chilling to hear anther lifetime sub player say "yeah, well, these bugs will get fixed when the game closes and gets on a private server."

[Eoraptor]

Yeah, sadly I think that is the point. If they did that, which I think they should, then they will be howls about free players getting to much for free.

I think the freeform slot is a bit steep, equivalent to 3 month subscribing I think, but if freeform was free, and all powers were free, and AT were on freeform level, then I think again, there will be howls about subscriptions being useless. I think CO problem is not enough features built in with F2P in mind. Naturally there should be some gate between free and someone who pay subscription but that requires features. In CO case, it's too restrictive.

Maybe one day games will find a balance. I think COX game away too much for free. A person that wasn't interested in Incarnate, MM or "what was that other AT that wasn't available for free? Dominator?" or didn't mind buying a slot here and there as they went, there was no point in the subscription. Someone like me, I didn't play doms nor MM much, didn't care about incarnates and if I wanted to save and not put anything into the game I could have and enjoyed it as if I never lost my subscription for free. But I wanted and was able to support $15 a month and more so it was no issue for me. But someone else with same boat and find something better to do with that $15 could have played and equally enjoyed themselves without putting a single penny to support the game's income.

I think that CoH managed to strike a pretty decent balance between pay content and free content. Between dual pistols, pet controlling, staff fighting, and so on, there were about a half dozen or so powers which were either subscript or purchase-to-unlock options. Likewise, using any of the games advanced systems like Invention, Auction, etc required either a monthly subscript or a pay as you go unlock

and then there were also the costume options that were subscript or unlock. And of course, the two-slot limit. The fact that the veteran rewards system stayed intact also helped to encourage paying customers, since some things like costume slots, long coat pieces, and certain spiff powers, buffs, and vanity pets were tied to pay playing time worked in that favour to. And the fact that after Freedom, chat and tells and trades required a minimum cash purchase sure "encouraged" buying things to.

Perhaps the only thing that might have improved that free-to-pay balance would have been to tighten up the registration system, since it was easy enough to get multiple free accounts and log into them right from the COH login screen.

and of course the fact that CoH was turning a profit speaks for itself. but that's another argument.

[Kaos Arcanna]

I had one AT that I bought when I picked the game up again after the COH closure. I had never gotten beyond level 6 before, so I didn't know anything about the freeform stuff.

I HATED the AT.

If I only had that option I wouldn't enjoy the game as much as I do.

That being said, there are some nice things about CO under the freeform stuff.

I don't know about the rest of you, but more than once I created a character where I loved the character but hated the powerset ... some of them I were loathe to start over again because I had badges that I couldn't replace. With CO, you take a freefrom character and completely change its powerset if you don't care for the first one you picked. That's pretty handy IMO.

[Kaiser Tarantula]

Yeah, sadly I think that is the point. If they did that, which I think they should, then they will be howls about free players getting to much for free.

My problem is, most of the time an archetype character, especially a silver archetype character, cannot succeed or be valuable for the role they were intended to perform, especially at high levels.

For instance, my Glacier AT is supposedly a tank.  I say supposedly because:

• I could never keep aggro, especially if freeforms or paid ATs are present, even with all available aggro perks
• I did not have the self-healing options a freeform tank would possess, and thus was reliant upon others for heals - heals that more often or not, were not forthcoming
• The previous two points meant that most of the time people would drop groups with me if I was the only available tank

Now, where's this leave me?  Playing ranged DPS in a tank role, which runs against the whole reason why I took the AT in the first place.

If you're going to give me the option to play a role, then give me the tools I need to play it well enough to be desired for it.  If I can't, then I'm going to get frustrated with your game and abandon it, not spend money.  I spend money on games I like, not games that piss me off and then say, "well it gets easier if you pay us."

[Thunder Glove]

Playing an AT?

Freeform give you more ability to choose more defense, especially picking a heal. Think Power armor set where invul is located have two that category alone. Sounds like picking up a heal, if you can, would do wonders for you.

Yes, I know. I've made several freeform characters since then, but I haven't had any urge to do Resistance on any of them, partially because it's so long, and partially becuase I hated the mechanics of much of it.  I especially hated that awful stealth section where you had to disguise yourself as an inmate and lose all your powers, and the "must protect a NPC for five full minutes from approximately 1000 respawning enemies all attacking simultaneously from every direction" part, each of which took me dozens of tries (I really grew to hate watching my character surrender to guards who he could have easily beaten over and over) and both of which I don't ever want to redo.  So you can add those to the "bizarre difficulty spikes" section.

1)  Combat.  Despite the claim on their web site that CO has "intelligent combat" I found it to be mainly twitchy and something that rewards spamming attacks rather than thoughtful tactics.  CoX got me used to doing a lot of thinking in combat, and this actually hurt my chances when I came up against tough bosses.  When I got stuck on the one that splits into 3 copies of itself, I eventually looked online for hints, and the most common suggestion was to just spam my best AoE.  And this worked!  Literally just clicking my AoE attack over and over till the enemy was defeated.  That, combined with the "energy builder" attack made combat extremely boring to me.  I want something for my brain to do when fighting, not just my mouse finger.

I agree with what this, too.  CoH made every playstyle viable - ranged damage, melee damage, taking, support, crowd control, whatever.  They were all equally effective and equally powerful. I loved setting up tricky builds that allowed me to target enemies from multiple sides to keep them from being able to attack effectively.  This how I mainly played my Masterminds and my Dominators (particularly my Earth/Ice/Leviathan, with her many ground-targeted effects, and her various pets - Golem, Corolax, even the Water Spout), and this strategy worked beautifully.

In contrast, the only playstyle I found viable in CO is "spam most powerful attack until opponent dies".  There are no buffs or debuffs that last more than ten seconds, heals are the only viable form of "support" (and even those are difficult to target), pets are woefully underpowered, defensive options are very limited compared to offensive options, and crowd control might as well be non-existent.

You can see this influence just by looking at how slotted passives are weighted:  There are five defensive passives, six support passives, and fourteen offensive passives.  Similarly, there is one and only one defensive/support toggle (I call it both, because it's essentially a weaker version of Dispersion Bubble from CoH) and eight offensive toggles.

[Xev]

Really guys, what.. It all boils down to taste. Some elements of CoH & CO are the same but they are not the same games and some players are bound to not like both, much less like both equally.

I remember time after time people would log into CoH and trash it because they liked some other game they play(ed) more and ohhh what a reaction they would get.  LB would rip you a new one if you came in with that attitude.

Being all into incarnate and min/maxing my guys and just plain sucking the marrow out of the game, I'd never consider giving up my sub in CoH. Not having a sub probably wasn't so bad if, just for example, you were a new player and bought things like the invention license for $1 a month when the time came for it to be handy. You can play CO without a sub and have fun too but you won't get the marrow.

CoH's market was genius as was that flood of new content that started with Feedom, I had a sub and still spent money! Some people spent a *lot*,

If you go into CO and try to make it CoH I think you may never be happy. If you're not happy during playtime, what's the point. CO, like every single thing in life is not perfect but I like it. Try it out and see what it does for you is my advice. If you like it and stick with it then I'd suggest, over time, to spend time tweaking the interface, hud, and graphics, too. It pays.

[Xev]

Yeah you right. I still wish it weren't so.

Me too! I lub CoH. It'll be back and I'll play it when it does if by then I haven't got ran over by a truck or whatever like this.

[Eoraptor]

Really guys, what.. It all boils down to taste. Some elements of CoH & CO are the same but they are not the same games and some players are bound to not like both, much less like both equally.

I remember time after time people would log into CoH and trash it because they liked some other game they play(ed) more and ohhh what a reaction they would get.  LB would rip you a new one if you came in with that attitude.

Being all into incarnate and min/maxing my guys and just plain sucking the marrow out of the game, I'd never consider giving up my sub in CoH. Not having a sub probably wasn't so bad if, just for example, you were a new player and bought things like the invention license for $1 a month when the time came for it to be handy. You can play CO without a sub and have fun too but you won't get the marrow.

CoH's market was genius as was that flood of new content that started with Feedom, I had a sub and still spent money! Some people spent a *lot*,

If you go into CO and try to make it CoH I think you may never be happy. If you're not happy during playtime, what's the point. CO, like every single thing in life is not perfect but I like it. Try it out and see what it does for you is my advice. If you like it and stick with it then I'd suggest, over time, to spend time tweaking the interface, hud, and graphics, too. It pays.

I think there's  two parts of it right there. Part of it is, yes, I want a game more closely resembling City of Heroes, and I admit that.

But that's story telling. Champions, for all its capes and its flight, doesn't FEEL super. I can't put my finger on it, but for some reason, when I run around Millennium City, it feels less like I am saving the city than I am playing out a social thriller about gang wars. Like others have said "god, it's Poe again?!" There's something unquantifiable in the writing, because for both games, you're essentially running the same "go kill x number of gang thugs and then do instanced door mission y" and yet at the end of the day, the tone is totally different (at least to me).

And don't get me started on the number of "homage" toons I see every time I log in. that just ticks me off, regardless of the platform, but champions seems rampant with them. usually the first thing I see when I log in is a colossus or a hulk or a wolverine. That says to me that Cryptic and Perfect World are not policing their servers about copyright the way that Paragon did, and suggests that their over-all level of involvement is low.

and then there's the pricing thing. For all the world, Champions feels to me like a cell phone game. It feels like it actively punishes me for not paying for it the way that a Zynga game does, making it difficult to advance or unlock content or play styles without dropping cold hard cash. Everyone keeps talking about free form builds, but all I get are the half-dozen or so locked archetypes. I feel like it should be popping up every five minutes and prompting me to "invite your friends on facebook" or flashing a banner advertisement at me. I never got that experience out of Heroes. It was more "oh, you liked this fully realized character? lend us some cash and you can have even more!"

Maybe my unease is not so much that Champions is not City of Heroes, so much as that it doesn't meet my standards for story telling or customer interaction. Like a few others have sad, there's just spots where it feels half-baked and the developers should really have another go at it. Like the six odd currencies or the repetitive story elements.

[JaguarX]

And don't get me started on the number of "homage" toons I see every time I log in. that just ticks me off, regardless of the platform, but champions seems rampant with them. usually the first thing I see when I log in is a colossus or a hulk or a wolverine. That says to me that Cryptic and Perfect World are not policing their servers about copyright the way that Paragon did, and suggests that their over-all level of involvement is low.

Well at one point, there was rampant copyright copies in COX too. They eventually cracked down on them but before then, there were plenty of wolverines copies. At one point in time I seen more wolverine copies more than I seen claw/regen scrapper that looked like it came from the mind of the player.

Then even after the crack down, there still were some, at least for a while before they got genericed.


In CO, they don't seem to enforce much of anything in game. People talk crazy that even in WoW they would have got banned for life. And they definitely don't police up the copycats. You would think, Cryptic, would have learned from the first lawsuit. Now they seem to be asking for it because by not enforcing it, they look like they are actually encouraging it and this time Marvel wouldn't need any tricks. They could log into any MC and within 5-10 mins see a problem that is not being addressed.


But what other people build have no bearing on how much or less or my mood of enjoying the game. If that was the case I wouldn't have made it beyond the third month after starting COX due to the abundance of wolverine clones.


Also on another note, although there have been many suggestions from ex-coxers there of "they should do this and that like COX", and some are good ideas but then again why would they go through the trouble of imitating COX only to have those same COXErs that joined and suggested the ideas to jump ship as soon as COX emulator or cox successor comes out while at the same time pissing off their core players, which many been playing CO rather than COX, or in some cases both, even while COX was alive, a fact that many seem to forget? Right now, the influx of players from COX overall are unsteady and unstable at best to actually even consider implementing any of their ideas with the high risk of by the time they get to it, they are on their way out anyways.

[Eoraptor]

In CO, they don't seem to enforce much of anything in game. People talk crazy that even in WoW they would have got banned for life. And they definitely don't police up the copycats. You would think, Cryptic, would have learned from the first lawsuit. Now they seem to be asking for it because by not enforcing it, they look like they are actually encouraging it and this time Marvel wouldn't need any tricks. They could log into any MC and within 5-10 mins see a problem that is not being addressed.

And that's what bothers me a lot. It's more of that cellphone mentality, "here's this thing I built, give me money." It speaks a lot to not just being hands off, but actively disinterested in the day-to-day running of the game and community. No one seems to be minding the store except to cash the checks and occasionally throws the players a bone with new content. As you say, not only does it turn people like me off, but it actively invites both bad player elements and legal challenges.

[Xev]

In CO, they don't seem to enforce much of anything in game. People talk crazy that even in WoW they would have got banned for life. And they definitely don't police up the copycats. You would think, Cryptic, would have learned from the first lawsuit. Now they seem to be asking for it because by not enforcing it, they look like they are actually encouraging it and this time Marvel wouldn't need any tricks. They could log into any MC and within 5-10 mins see a problem that is not being addressed.

This would be an example of something about the game that is refreshing to me and is another man's poison.

At first I was shocked people were allowed to speak their minds uncensored but I'm into it now. As with other things I have adjusted to and learned to appreciate about the game.

I would not play a game with things in it that bother me a lot, btw. Gametime is funtime. This is another difference between me and some others and I'm not just pointing you out Eoraptor.

It's all about taste. What makes your fun-meter go 'yay'. I'm rooting for all of ya that are still looking for this. For serious.

Haven't got any plans to leave CO anytime soon but as soon as I get more bandwidth to play around with I'm gonna check out STO and maybe Secret World, and NWO for sure due to history purposes, and see how they do on the meter. And I'll be one of the first to log back into CoH when it's back. I'd check out GuildWars II but the company making money off of it is crap, to me, so it doesn't matter what the game is like, to me.

CoH isn't the first MMO I've lost. The first one I lost, I lived in, me and the mrs,, both. I mean we lived there. Almost all our friends were there, we sometimes spent holidays with them there, my wife wanted to have a second honeymoon in a particular place that meant something to us online.. some of our best times were there and we'd travelled from coast to coast and to Austria where we lived for awhile and back and did a lot of the fun stuff in-between that would make this post a monolithic wall of text so we had at least a clue how to have fun and we still chose to live in our mmo.

So I get what it's like to lose something like this, like what we experienced. It's just not my first time at the rodeo is all. I just mention this because I think I came off as insensitive sometimes to all The Moaning(TM) that was in LB and those 'other channels', in COH, and I didn't mean to then, or now.

J00 must find the fun in life and grab it by the waa-waa while you have the power to. If CO isn't fun, j00 must search on grasshoppah. Or something like this. Although logic often fails me I'm thinking Titan didn't give CO it's own lil corner lot just so people could express how disappointed they are with the game and if that is true - then most of us posting here regularly are probly having fun playing regularly too so there must be some redeeming value to the game, just not to all, obviously.

I'm rooting for ya guys that need your funtime back and am sorry you're not finding it in CO. Funtime is a super precious thing that I can't wish enough on anyone here.

[JaguarX]

This would be an example of something about the game that is refreshing to me and is another man's poison.

At first I was shocked people were allowed to speak their minds uncensored but I'm into it now. As with other things I have adjusted to and learned to appreciate about the game.

I would not play a game with things in it that bother me a lot, btw. Gametime is funtime. This is another difference between me and some others and I'm not just pointing you out Eoraptor.

It's all about taste. What makes your fun-meter go 'yay'. I'm rooting for all of ya that are still looking for this. For serious.

Haven't got any plans to leave CO anytime soon but as soon as I get more bandwidth to play around with I'm gonna check out STO and maybe Secret World, and NWO for sure due to history purposes, and see how they do on the meter. And I'll be one of the first to log back into CoH when it's back. I'd check out GuildWars II but the company making money off of it is crap, to me, so it doesn't matter what the game is like, to me.

CoH isn't the first MMO I've lost. The first one I lost, I lived in, me and the mrs,, both. I mean we lived there. Almost all our friends were there, we sometimes spent holidays with them there, my wife wanted to have a second honeymoon in a particular place that meant something to us online.. some of our best times were there and we'd travelled from coast to coast and to Austria where we lived for awhile and back and did a lot of the fun stuff in-between that would make this post a monolithic wall of text so we had at least a clue how to have fun and we still chose to live in our mmo.

So I get what it's like to lose something like this, like what we experienced. It's just not my first time at the rodeo is all. I just mention this because I think I came off as insensitive sometimes to all The Moaning(TM) that was in LB and those 'other channels', in COH, and I didn't mean to then, or now.

J00 must find the fun in life and grab it by the waa-waa while you have the power to. If CO isn't fun, j00 must search on grasshoppah. Or something like this. Although logic often fails me I'm thinking Titan didn't give CO it's own lil corner lot just so people could express how disappointed they are with the game and if that is true - then most of us posting here regularly are probly having fun playing regularly too so there must be some redeeming value to the game, just not to all, obviously.

I'm rooting for ya guys that need your funtime back and am sorry you're not finding it in CO. Funtime is a super precious thing that I can't wish enough on anyone here.

Yep. I don't mind the uncensored and the ability to speak on minds, but find it odd to write rules against certain behaviors but don't even bother to enforce those rules. It sets many people up for failure. They look at the rules and think, "ok that is law of the land." Enter the game, get called a "wetback" or the likes many times and go to report this then...nothing. Although in the rules it says racial slurs are not allowed in fact I think in CO rules it actually says will not be tolerated.

Now on the other hand if it, simply said "We don't have man power to moderate chat, ya on your own." then more than likely the person entering and get called "wetback" probably would expect it at some point and know that it's not against the rules and probably fire back with a few "well better being a subhuman that was better off in slavery" remarks. And all is well if that is what the community want to do. 

It's not what is said by ignorant people that probably are a waste of oxygen and should be sterilized before they can have children, that is so bothersome. It's the fact they write rules under the guise that it's not allowed, but allow it. They lose great credibility and probably why saying ya going to report someone even if they threaten to come to your house and gut your family and your two babies like a fish in front of you since they have your address they got off Facebook, is probably laughed at in that game. Even though in most games with the same written rules, that is grounds for a ban for a long time if not forever even in WoW, where it's supposedly troll central. Petty jabs and usually online stuff. In CO, people take it further because they know nothing will happen. Hell, even the general population just kind of shrug. What can they do?

That is why I think they might as well just throw their rule book out the window. It is about as toothless as a 103 year old trying to gnaw through tank armor.

[Eoraptor]

That non-enforcement of the rules was a huge reason I left Deviant Art a few years ago to. I don't care if there's rules or not rules on a place; but if someone tells me there's rules, and then doesn't enforce them, or only enforces them when it's convenient or important for them, it makes me want to find the physical server racks and drop a grenade in them.

but I suppose I should clarify... this thread was originally over on the City of Heroes section of Titan, not the CO section, and was intended to be read by the CoH folks, so please don't read this and think I/we are complaining about Champions. I in particular am trying to figure out what things it is about the game that turn me off where CoH turned me on. and the things others have said here go a long way to that. 

[Brou]

I can only say that I hope you find a way to make the powers and stats work for you, and that as time goes by, you find some reason that makes Millennium City worth saving.

[Xev]

Had to come back because I was playing just now and it dawned on me what's been nagging me about Kyriani's post. I've kinda gotten to where I maybe even prefer the female (and probably male as far as that goes) models in CO over CoH, now, but.. when you see that post, the CO girl really does look sad in comparison to the one in CoH.

I think one reason why is that bleak background.. I never was impressed by that background and it doesn't do anything for that toon. That costume kinda doesn't do it for me either.

I know it's a kinda silly thing to bring up but the very not serious point is, if you wanted to I think you could do better on the CO girl. Maybe you need more costume unlocks. I've got access to tons more pieces now than when I started and it does make a difference.

Just trying to be encouraging on the subject in case you were looking for such a thing, Kyri..

And then I read this whole wetback thing. W...t...h.. Man, I never had anything like that in mind. That's not being uncensored that's being an ass. I never experienced any of this in CO yet. Actually, I was thinking how relatively well most people monitor themselves given that they pretty much don't have to.

but I suppose I should clarify... this thread was originally over on the City of Heroes section of Titan, not the CO section, and was intended to be read by the CoH folks, so please don't read this and think I/we are complaining about Champions. I in particular am trying to figure out what things it is about the game that turn me off where CoH turned me on. and the things others have said here go a long way to that. 

This is a good clarification! It seemed really weird to me that this whole topic was flowing here like it was but now it makes perfect sense. Here's to you finding out what turns you on, soon, and hopefully doing it, often!  : D

[LaughingAlex]

I tried to ask for help, but nobody seemed to know the exact specifics.  I kept getting killed anyway.  The combination of the Warden and her pet Demon attacking me from both sides wore me down even with Invulnerability (since Invuln just reduces damage, it doesn't negate it.  And with no heals and no natural regen, they still wore me down)

... that's another thing I miss.  CO characters seem to be built entirely for straight-up offense, with defenses, buffs, heals, and pets all being distant second, and crowd control trailing far behind those.  It's very difficult if not impossible to get the sort of layered defenses that you could easily get on a CoH character (especially if you want to stick to a character theme, and not just pick random powers from unrelated frameworks), and tricks like distracting foes with pets or knocking them down or lowering their damage barely work.  So when there's an enemy that straight-up offense can't beat, I die.

Actually freeformers can get a very good mix of every single thing in there.  The only thing you wouldn't be able to max is crowd control which is horribly weak in CO anyways.  All of my characters can inflict very solid damage, tank, and heal themselves at the same time to some extent or another.  I just hate the lack of real support powers in CO, there are no real force multipliers that help the team as a whole.  And I live in endless fear of the nerf bat ruining the game and degrading it further to a holy trinity of "you must have a healer and tank and a bunch of damage dealers".