Do you think the game got TOO user friendly at the end?

[srmalloy]

I can't think of a single game that gives you new gear when you level up. I have no idea what you're talking about.

Other than the one specific case from SWTOR when you finish your class mission series on your starting planet and travel from to your faction's fleet, get a mission to talk to the advanced trainer for your class, and pick your advanced class (i.e., a Smuggler picking either Gunslinger or Scoundrel), and you get a bag with a weapon appropriate to your class (Gunslingers, for example, get an offhand pistol, Scoundrels get an offhand generator/shield, etc.), I can't think of another; you either buy gear from a vendor or purchase it off the game's equivalent of Wentworth's.

[JaguarX]

I can't think of a single game that gives you new gear when you level up. I have no idea what you're talking about.

Gear that affect appearance-outfit changes when you gear up.

Go to vendor or trainer- Grab gear, and even though they are seller of items, you appearance change in a one stop shop.

Thus since the appearance change with what gear you choose in a way the vendor/trainer sort of doubles as a tailor in that case.

In COX gear no affect on appearance thus, separate, at first, place for costumes. Trainer/tailor. Still since gear/ability dont affect appearance, you can now change appearance/train up in one stop.


Point being appearance change at places other than tailor happens in many games(usually due to gear) thus the concept is not so outlandish as it seems on the surface.

[Botzo]

I kind of didn't like the side switching. I mean I did at the time, but looking back at the way Heroes and Villains was set up I feel the fact that ATs could swap sides lessened the whole point of some of the Coop zones, and how the AT setup for each side was. I liked the fact that things got faster but it became a solo team fest with everyone jumping off in 8 different directions. There wasn't anymore resting, there wasn't anymore *use the back elevators so you don't aggro too much*. And I liked the traveling in City. It was much more interactive than most mmos of fly to zone x, just point and press autofly. And 14 really wasn't that long of a wait for a travel power. You could hit 11-12 just doing one good sewer run, clearing Lost and Hellions on the way down.

[thunderforce]

I kind of didn't like the side switching. I mean I did at the time, but looking back at the way Heroes and Villains was set up I feel the fact that ATs could swap sides lessened the whole point of some of the Coop zones, and how the AT setup for each side was.

Well, quite. I'm not sure there's a good answer to that one; originally blueside and redside teaming had a very different feel with the more aggressive redside ATs - I tended to feel blueside was "weather the storm and grind them down" where redside was "take them down before they get us" - and it would have been nice to keep that with opposite-side ATs an exciting rarity - but every player will want to Go Rogue.

I liked the fact that things got faster but it became a solo team fest with everyone jumping off in 8 different directions. There wasn't anymore resting, there wasn't anymore *use the back elevators so you don't aggro too much*.

My perception was very much that earlier, especially after the Defense nerf, teaming was a matter of thinking about what you were doing; later, just a matter of doing your job. There are no prizes for guessing what I blame that on.

And I liked the traveling in City. It was much more interactive than most mmos of fly to zone x, just point and press autofly. And 14 really wasn't that long of a wait for a travel power. You could hit 11-12 just doing one good sewer run, clearing Lost and Hellions on the way down.

Yes, I didn't really see a problem there after the issue when contacts became a bit less coy about their cellphone numbers, especially later with everyone getting Swift/Hurdle by default.

[doc7924]

I kind of didn't like the side switching. I mean I did at the time, but looking back at the way Heroes and Villains was set up I feel the fact that ATs could swap sides lessened the whole point of some of the Coop zones, and how the AT setup for each side was. I liked the fact that things got faster but it became a solo team fest with everyone jumping off in 8 different directions. There wasn't anymore resting, there wasn't anymore *use the back elevators so you don't aggro too much*. And I liked the traveling in City. It was much more interactive than most mmos of fly to zone x, just point and press autofly. And 14 really wasn't that long of a wait for a travel power. You could hit 11-12 just doing one good sewer run, clearing Lost and Hellions on the way down.

Yes it was cool but to me it ruined the whole dynamic when you could be any AT in either red or blue side.

The whole point of COV was to have heroes and villains and at the end it was all one big mish-mash.

It was one thing if you had to earn the right to change sides, that at least gave a sort of RPG aspect to it: a villain gone good or a hero gone bad.

But when you could just make a villain AT in Atlas - to me they all stopped being villain and hero AT's.

[Mantic]

Yeah, well... on most servers redside was a desert. On all servers it was a desert outside primetime. As someone who first showed up with a collector's copy of City of Villains and whose first level 50 character after two years playing was a SR Stalker that soloed 95% or more of the way, I would never complain about any convenience that mitigated reliance on the inclinations of other players. Arachnos still had to start in that desert, and there was arguably no AT in the game more suited to a support role. Good thing the early game got streamlined, too...

Basically, I can't say I had any complaints at all about where the game was going for the last two or three years before the shutdown.

If the game hadn't been moving in the direction it was, starting with the NCSoft buyout, and particularly in the wake if i14, I would probably not have been around, blowing scads of real money on multiple accounts and ready to pitch a fit about NCSoft's new Asia-focused management blowing us all off last year.

[JaguarX]

Yeah, well... on most servers redside was a desert. On all servers it was a desert outside primetime. .

Basically.

utside a very small window when some supergroup just happen to be passing through, rarely seen anyone else. Or heard about anyone else redside.

[saipaman]

I played a lot red side on Freedom.  Teaming was extremely rare.

I was fortunate enough to do an all stalker Strike Force.   Definitely different.

[Reiraku]

I was part of the first all Stalker LRSF, before they nerfed down the Phalanx. It was awesome

[CheerGunbunny]

Long ago, did an all-blaster Bastion TF.    Yes, when it was still Bastion.  I was one of I think 3 AR blasters, so we did have enough AE & Knockback to keep the hordes off of us (full 8-hero team).  about every 3 or 4 spawns on a map, we'd have a faceplant.

Vandal necessitated much use of purple and red insps.  :)

Not sure, but I think I recall 2 names who were on it...Bioly, and maybe Friggin' Taser.

I haz a sad now....miss my City.  :(

[goodtime]

Long ago, did an all-blaster Bastion TF.

I'm jealous.   I always wanted to do one of the all-[archetype] TF runs, but only ever came close once.  Just missed an all-troller Manticore, I think it was.  :(   

I loved the fact that you can do stuff like that in CoH.   

[CheerGunbunny]

Tried an all-melee ITF near the end....failed.  Rommie was just too much, could not throw enough damage on him fast enough to make up for lack of heals/debuffs/buffs.  Did an all blaster/corruptor LGTF, too.  :)

[dwturducken]

I never had the pleasure of an all-stalker SF, but some friends and I made an all-stalker team (then villain group) that was pretty vicious before we got Assassin <power>! There was more than one mission where we liked the arc, but the particular mission was boring enough to Hide to the glowy at the end. It did make the kidnap missions a bit more challenging, though. :)

[Aggelakis]

Tried an all-melee ITF near the end....failed.  Rommie was just too much, could not throw enough damage on him fast enough to make up for lack of heals/debuffs/buffs.  Did an all blaster/corruptor LGTF, too.  :)

I did an all-scrapper ITF...bleeping amazing.

[Eoraptor]

I ran a couple of low-level all-blaster TFs.... personally I never enjoyed them. I can understand why some would enjoy the challenge, but to me it was always an unbearable slog which left me thinking "for want of one tank that would have gone ten times smoother"

In general, I liked the changes made to the game over the years. my biggest complaint with the issue 2 era was that it took FOREVER to get anywhere since you had to wait till level 10+ for your travel powers and you couldn't usually achieve those levels without trapsing through the hollows, which was also a slog. So when the bumped travel down to level four, and when they got rid of the mandentory team missions, and yes, when they merged the train system, it made things so much more enjoyable to me for not having to bust hump fr several minutes just to accomplish some minor goal like a costume change.

Some other changes I did not care for. I think everyone can agree with me that making chat a pay-feature in Freedom was the stupidest move concievable, and I never really cared for the big tank-nerfing that happened around issue 4-6.

but in general, I thought all the changes they made were a great way to balance the ever-growing content of the game (I mean ome on, there was still stuff in atlas park that referenced all the way back to issue one right up till D day) with features which were easy for folks who werre not comic book geeks, or mmo fiends, to understand and enjoy.

[Blue Pulsar]

Don't get me wrong here - I adored this game since day one.

However once they started catering to the 'fast' crowds it kind of annoyed me.

It took me over a year of playing back in 2004-5 to get my first 50 and unlock my Peacebringer. And maybe 6 to 8 month to unlock the villain special AT.

By the last two years or so with AE people were getting to 50 in one afternoon and unlocking the Kheldians at 20.

Then to add insult to us long time players - you could BUY a Kheldian or the villain equivalent from he store.

At this point I felt new players were not experiencing the game properly - just the mad rush to get to 50 in one day.

IMO I felt they should have locked people out of AE until at least lvl 10 so they would at least get out and do stuff.

Honest to God I met a lvl 50 in AE in Atlas that NEVER LEFT the building except to go train at MS Liberty.

And I met a few 50's who didn't even know how to get to Steel Canyon.

People could play and level up how they want - and that's fine -but I found teaming with those 50's to be terrible because they had no idea how to actually play their hero, only ever playing in AE.

QFT x Ten. Literally.

I felt this way a lot. Especially the AE thing. I have to admit, I had two accounts and thoroughly enjoyed the ability to ramp my toon to a nice playable level when I knew it was going to be a rough go of it for the first 20 or so. But the fact that there were numerous 50s that had no clue how to get to a mission, let alone how to even slot their toons with SOs. It was disgusting.

I never got too into the HEATs and VEATs, but having access to them made hitting 50 that much sweeter. Getting them at 20 (which you could do without PLing in an afternoon towards the end) and even being able to buy them was a little insulting.

And like others here, even though I had remote access to the market and AE, I still liked to go there to use the facilities.

I'm kinda glad they combined the lines for Heroside, but they had no need to do such a thing for redside. I mean, we had, what? Seven main vill zones? Mercy, PO, Cap, Shark, Nerva, St. Mart, and Grand? I remember being able to get to the arbiter in Grand with relative ease as a level 1. I remember dying several times trying to get to PI as a level 12. Redside didn't need the help.

The tailors was a bit silly and I agree that having all the extra Icons and Facemakers was pointless, especially when trainers could change your clothes for you too. I can't say it effected me much, but then again, I didn't often change my outfit on toons. When I made it, it pretty much stayed the same. If I got a new idea for a new look, it often came with a new character.

To be honest, I was kinda sad that travel powers were able to be obtained so early. I liked having that level 14 milestone. I think when they lowered it to, what was it, 6? I think that was when I noticed that the game was getting quite easy.

But in all fairness, the end game was also getting a lot more intense. RSF and STF. Maxing a character out with IOs, then pumping them up with boosters. Purple IOs. All the way up to iTrials. So, I guess it balanced out.

So, yeah. I don't think the game got so much "too user friendly" as it did, "too noob friendly." I got to the point where, if I was looking for members for a decent pug, I'd look at their vet badges and set bonuses. I'd pick a level 35 4 year vet over a level 50 with no badges any day. Hell, even incarnate powers got easy to get. Newer players could ride a team for hours doing BAF and get +2 fairly easy. The plus side to incarnates was that at least they had to pay for the game, so you knew they were going to take it a bit more seriously.

I did, however, like the idea of giving the perks to the vets. But then again, I played since 2005.

Bah, look at my long rambling post. I'm starting to feel like Jaguar... I'll quit here.

[Blue Pulsar]

Though, I will say this. I think the worst part about making the beginning easier, and making the end game harder/more in-depth, was that they ended up splitting the player base. The new players never got the guidance from the older players because the two ends got so far from each other. We rocked the iTrials and high level TFs and they floundered in KR and PO.

[Mythic13]

The one big thing in my opinion that hastened the end of the game, not counting corporate in Seoul, was emphasizing instanced missions over zone events and miscellaneous street sweeping.

I understand, seeing the long queues in games like Everquest when a quest is within the world and it ends in a boss fight that spawns 5 minutes after it last got killed, how innovative the notion that everyone gets their own boss fight and don't have to wait for it to return was, combined with large mission bonuses and reduced debt from missions emptied the streets in a very short period of time. 

Now I started playing at the end of August 2004 and the streets and skies were full of heroes, and suddenly, they weren't.  You still saw them going between missions, around the trainers, around the tram stations, in the stores and Icon but it wasn't the same.  Then they started to add QoL features that made it easier to travel to your missions, no longer needing to wait for a tram or transfer in Sky and Steel between the two.  When they added the universities, The Vault and Wentworth's it was three more places you could find gatherings of heroes but eventually they too got QoL rewards and methods to let them do those activities elsewhere.  Icon was the last local until trainers became tailors as well.

Some of this happened after the introduction of AE sort of as a way to provide some of the same convenience but in the normal game but the end result is you didn't have to transverse the city anymore.  Travel powers at a low level makes some sense from a RPing PoV but it primarily meant the the city was fly, jump, port over or speed by country.  At least back when we had to hoof it for 14 levels on the ground we felt like we were in a city full of people wandering the streets.

The end result was what looked to be an abandoned city, empty of heroes, instead of the city I first entered nearly 9 years ago.  If you were a new player you would wonder if anybody else was playing.  With private channels being the normal way to communicate, with hide being the default condition of players who played during the RMT invasion post market and maybe a third of the player population at peak, a new player would wonder how you can play an MMO without other players.

Notice I'm not really talking about difficulty in playing, just environmental changes over the years.

I've been playing GW2 for a while now (letting the boos die down) and one of the aspects I enjoy about it is every zone is full of what's called dynamic events.  Think of the troll rave or apartment fire except multiply that by 20 in every zone.  And with their philosophy that encouraging player cooperation being paramount, players can join in or leave without the need to join teams just so they get better rewards.  There is no tagging of critters so they count toward your total and not someone else.  Everyone gets the same XP and number of drops of loot as long as you do some minimum amount of damage.  But most important is as these events occur, it causes players nearby to rush over and join in which means you see and meet other players all the time in the open world.  And as they join in (well get within an range of the event) the event scales up and as they leave it scales down.  It also helps that they have a daily reward if you do 5 of 9 variable goals for the day and event participation is almost guarantee to be one or more of those goals.

My point is it's not that the game got too easy from making the critters easier to defeat, it got easier for your character to not be a involved with the game world and that leads to a world where to an outsider, a new player, empty of other players and that's death to an MMO, the appearance that it's already dead.

Finally made an account on here (COH Vet) (Played off and on) and I must say this post hits the nail on the head for me. This is exactly what I saw from begining (Played about a year after launch) to end.

Great post.

[thunderforce]

In general, I liked the changes made to the game over the years. my biggest complaint with the issue 2 era was that it took FOREVER to get anywhere since you had to wait till level 10+ for your travel powers and you couldn't usually achieve those levels without trapsing through the hollows, which was also a slog. So when the bumped travel down to level four, and when they got rid of the mandentory team missions, and yes, when they merged the train system, it made things so much more enjoyable to me for not having to bust hump fr several minutes just to accomplish some minor goal like a costume change.

But before then, contacts starting giving out their numbers more easily, the Hollows stopped putting your level 6 mission door on the other side of a million angry Igneous, and you got Swift/Hurdle as inherents. I think there's a middle ground; the city needed some sense of structure - indeed, it's because it had that sense of structure it feels like a real place.

[ag88t88]

And, CoH did remove stuff, but only at low levels, and it was replaced with equivalent stuff. I, personally, was pissed about them dropping the origin-based contacts and missions at the low levels. Also, I could have taken or left the "new" super group that they threw in around level 5 or 6. It was kinda creative, but just felt "extra."

Yeah, but when they did remove things, lower level missions and the original positron TF, galaxy City etc, they put those thing on Ooroborus so that people could revisit that content if they wanted to. You could still go to the "echo" of galaxy city, Do the original Positron TF, do the original low level missions etc.  Hell even the CoP got put back in and the Calvin Scott Trial got put in Ooroborus.  So yeah, they changed or replaced or removed some lower level content here and there for the sake of "Streamlining" or what ever, but they had a system in place that people could still do that content, so it's not like it was wholly removed.