I'd agree with that. Contemplating the naval while Rome burns comes to mind. But Cryptic/Paragon did some very good work. The basics of the game. The Archetypes. The 1-50 levelling. Combat. Interface. ITF was a great piece of post - Cryptic work.
Less successful for me?
CoV. Sideways move. 'Pressing' limited resources over twice the area. Rather than filling the 'empty' zones with MORE content.
Rogue. Compounding this error. More great zones. Beta tested mission content. (So my Duo partner thought...)
Incarnates. A fracture rather than a progression. (Not like the game I'd come to recognise at all...like a pre-op for CoH 2.)
Lack of moving to a modern gaming engine. Some say the graphics were starting to look dated. (Me? I just loved how it played.)
Mission types. All seemed to familiar after doing 1-50 a few times.
NOT going back to original archeyptes sooner and making them 'more so.'
Perhaps not creating individual archetype mission arcs for 1-50 for each type. (A lot of work? Better than closing down. The 1-50 journey was too samey for some.)
Game was too slow. (Too fast for me. But why not allow one server to switch on perma Hasten for all as inherent. SB buff as inherent for all who want to play that fast. Me? I'd just slip around maps with that...)
Hmm. Key expansions? Sideways moves that didn't build on the core game in the right way. Splintered the player base...while not really addressing. Not adequately building on what made the core game so great.
...and for the money invested...did these 'key expansions' give a return of investment for NC Soft in terms of revenue and play base expansion?
Worse. Did(?) some things alienate key parts of the player base that didn't come back.
Subjective opinions. But they can cause erosion of a player base.
Some may disagree. But how come CoH is dead while some dreadful mediocre MMOs still survive.
Was it a lack of advertising by NC Soft only? Cultural? Politics. Egos. Fickle MMO fans? Lessons learned too little too late?
*wrong thread. I know. But it just came out...
Azrael.
Sort of a massively lagged reply, considering how long ago this was posted, but I thought it was interesting that I disagree with you on most of this
CoV was great, the game needed more ATs. I wasn't a fan of them strictly dividing the hero and villain games, but I think that was a Statesman/Cryptic decision, which would explain why I hated it
Going Rogue was even better, and absolutely needed. Getting rid of the silly and arbitrary distinction between hero and villain ATs was something that had been needed for a long long time. In fact, Paragon Studios kept continually knocking down the walls separating CoH and CoV, which was a very good decision to me.
Incarnates I can't comment on much, I had some level 50s but I had MASSIVE altitis... I only played on Virtue but I had purchased the maximum number of character slots, and had every last one of them filled, so I got a second account just so that I could keep creating new characters when the whim took me. So I spent a lot of time at low levels and not a lot at high levels. Plus I had gone one one of my many vacations from the game just before it went F2P, and when I got around to wanting to jump back in again, the game had just gone offline :/
Separate mission sets for ATs would have just made me angry. I was vehemently opposed to any content being restricted to a specific AT or origin. The type of character I want to play should NOT dictate what my story will be. Too samey? A huge part of the appeal to me was that it didn't matter what missions you did, the game was so different for every powerset, let alone each AT. The gameplay was so diverse.
In the end... I liked the game when it first released. I liked it less and less with every change Cryptic made to it. And then found myself liking it more and more after they thankfully left to build Crapions Online and Positron got put in charge of it. Pretty much everything they did after that was massive win to me. It just seemed like Jack/Cryptic wanted CoH to be like EQ or DAoC and were peeved that it got played totally differently when the players got a hold of it. Constant nerfs and changes that all seemed aimed at slowing you down and forcing you to fight fewer enemies at once when the joy of the game was that you were a SUPERHERO who could stand in the midst of 10 mobs and smash them all, not like EQ/DAoC where you were forced to cower and carefully pull one enemy at a time lest you die horribly.
Positron's team continually buffed the players, and offered conveniences and things that made the game faster, easier and less frustrating to level and gear up, and just generally brought back the feeling of being "super" for me.