What's did you like and not like about CoH?

[ukaserex]

I did not like the burn nerf - where the fire made the mobs "scared" and scatter, despite taunting. I understood why it was done, and can even see their point, but I still didn't like it. When they "nerfed" the first nerf, I was very happy.

I didn't like the missions with simultaneous clicks - was glad they fixed most of those.

I didn't like CoV. A dark, creepy place. I thought they should have just made villains and set them loose on hero side. The reasons I didn't like CoV - it drew players away from CoH and the zones were creepy! Not that I teamed that much - I can be a bit moody. Wanting to team some days, wanting to /ghide on others. But, for Maria Jenkins arcs and whatnot, I recall there being a lot off villain players online so I couldn't get up a team to do the AVs. It's part of the reason I got a second account - one character to do the tanking, the other to do the damage. (or buffing, while one does damage)

And honestly, there were some amazing times in Siren's call pre-issue 13. It was a blast, and it was a darn shame that it couldn't like that again. Post i-13, I don't think I ever saw more than 10 characters in zone at one time. Just a shame. It was one of the best new zones - a lot of us, even those of us that weren't all about pvp. I mean, I could not care less about pvp. But, because there were toxic tarantulas, @sinala and myself, we'd go in there and kill them for the badge. She was an emp, gave me clear mind, so I could always see the stalkers. Freeze Ray, bitter freeze ray and then Bitter Ice blast, ice blast, dead. Occasionally, ice patch would help out, too.
Sometimes, they'd gang up on us. Darn masterminds and their lieutenants! I'd try to get the MM in my sights, but those rascals, some of them wouldn't even be in sight! Drove me crazy, but it was fun. If I knew then what I knew now, I'd have made a bind to target them somehow....lol.
 
I also loved the ski slopes. Very fun stuff.

I would have never trick-or-treated if there weren't badges involved. It was fun the first couple of times, but after that, it got old. Nobody put a gun to my head, but you know, the pursuit of things shiny is why I played.

[rezulin]

I liked being able to play and group up with friends no matter what level you, or they, were.  I have yet to find a desirable game that does this. 

I disliked the End crash caused by the Nuke powers (luckily they were getting fixed).  Also disliked not being able to spend alignment merits more than 1 per 20 hour period. 

[Shifter]

Here are my top 3

Like:
#1 Build customization.
#2 Being able to build in game playable content (AE and bases)
#3 Both good solo and group play

Dislike:
#1 Support team. Low knowledge support staff and ones that flat out lied to me really did not make my day...
#2 Bug Hunter. I reported hundreds of bugs over the years, including a god mode that I did not exploit. No badge.
#3 Influence/infamy spammers. At least when it subscription they could ban accounts, but with free-to-play, they would just make another account in a couple of minutes and be spamming again.

[silvers1]

Liked:
Eight man groups
ITF
The community
The incredible array of powersets and archtypes.
No cookie cutter builds
The costume builder - and some of the very creative costumes people came up with
No need for the typical "Trinity" required in most other MMORPGs
Targeted toward the casual player

Disliked:
The way the Devs built systems like AE and Base Building - then left them to rot
IO Sets - way too complex
non-fluff items in the store
Pricing of store items - too expensive
AE - could have been so much more, but they nerfed it into oblivion, placed too many restrictions, then left it
with no enhancments other than the occasional nerf.
The elimination of Galaxy City
Perez Park
Power customization - my eyeballs were seared on many teams.  Needed someway to turn down power intensity and/or disable my view of power
customizations.
ED
GDN
Too strict naming policy
The Praetorian zones/story arcs -several missions were too hard to solo
Gold Spammers
Help Channel spammers
PVP

[Dev7on]

I also didn't like the new City of Heroes Freedom theme song. It didn't fit for a hero.

[Thunder Glove]

I don't think the CoH:Freedom theme was meant to be traditionally heroic in the vein of the old CoH theme.  Instead, it was almost telling a story of heroes overcoming villains.

It started out slow and depressing, but soon gained a note of hope, becoming more triumphant as it went on, followed by a dropping out of the triumphant theme and a scare chord, then an upbeat part, soon overlaid with the return of the triumphant theme, and ending on that tone, with a heroic fanfare.  Basically, the world is bad (the slow part), heroes emerge to try to clean it up (the triumphant part), the villains strike back (the quiet part and the scare chord), the heroes take action (the fast part), and win (the triumphant reprise and ending fanfare).

I thought it was VERY fitting for a hero, but you have to listen to the whole thing to really hear it.

(P.S., Devs Hate Redside)

[Shifter]

I did not like the way they implemented free to play. It was annoying finding out I can't do content with everyone in a PUG, and it gave the gold sellers/spammers unlimited accounts to create immediately after one got banned. At least with a verified account they could ban problem players. I would have really liked it if they limited all new accounts to a single server. Then at least it would cost the gold spammers real money to transfer accounts out. I kind of like the idea of making a "Purgatory" server as well. Instead of banning, a player gets transferred over to that server and cannot transfer out for a set amount of time. Perhaps have half XP and drop rates on that server or something.

[Baja]

This thread has opened my eyes on the diversity of individual players for sure.

I liked pretty much everything, this was a game with so much variety it never got old for me, at least not to the point where I said "I've seen/done it all."
Some big ones were:

1.) Pvp community pre I-13 changes. Everything was fast and in your face, everybody had a place even if some were overpowered it didn't make playing something weaker less. Obviously 1v1 in a game like CoH has no place, which was very clear after the changes that were implemented to allow such a thing and still ended up with cookie cutters. The fact is/was if you're the type to want a cookie cutter you'll make one. I'll never forget sirens call when it was packed full...

2.) RP community was super immersive. Although it turned into a who knows who type of situation at the end, the early stages were phenomenal. I can't say the clique-ness was any worse than the pvp community though, it made sense RP'rs would build very personal in depth stories that probably weren't suited for public.

3.) The drastic difference between Coh/CoV. The gritty dark world of villains, although under developed and disliked by the devs, was a really lovely thing to me. I wish the color palettes were less brown/tan and more black/neon, none the less I enjoyed my dark alleys. CoH was flat out beautiful, I suppose it a lot easier to want to design things easy on the eyes so it all kind of makes sense as to why the devs favored it. I definitely can't hold a grudge, especially knowing how much more versatile and expressive you can get with hero side. I just wish there was a a villain area that was colorful and creepy, very difficult to pull off though.

4.) The powers! The sheer amount of combinations is crazy to think about even by today's mmo standards. Not only that they were so unique, casting animations were obviously shared due to budget/time constraints but the fx themselves were amazing.

5.) Costume design. Once again a mind blowing ability offered to create a unique style/look. Very rarely did you see two people dressed exactly alike and if they were it was usually intentional or some type of event pieces offered for Xmas/Halloween etc. Cannot speak highly enough about this.

Honourable mention goes to the chat/communication system, the best/easiest system I've ever had the pleasure of using.

As far as dislikes goes, probably the amount of servers. There were some being used by very niche groups that otherwise were empty. This really made it an obstacle to connect with other like-minded people. I understand the capacity issues, seeing how virtue/freedom were almost always in the red, but even still I found it difficult to find teams even within those two servers if I wasn't Lvl 50.

Also the mission creator. I get the devs lacked content but it turned into a farming heaven that really made it pointless to play through the stuff they spent so many hours creating. If there were some way to allow players to design content and have "the best of" implemented into the game simply by placing some npcs and door entries around the pre-existing maps I think that would have been much cooler.

These are definitely my opinions though, I literally miss it all so much but hey I figured I'd give this thread a shot.

[MaidMercury]

I really liked the new shop. The menu was a bit cumbersome at first, but not bad.
I purchased a neat Rocket pack for an alt character.
The Steampunk was nice, even though I didn't have a steam character.

They were adding all kinds of things, accessories, emos, who knows what would've been added by now?

[HEATSTROKE]

Everything and Nothing..

[Dal]

I didn't like CoV. A dark, creepy place. I thought they should have just made villains and set them loose on hero side. The reasons I didn't like CoV - it drew players away from CoH and the zones were creepy! Not that I teamed that much - I can be a bit moody. Wanting to team some days, wanting to /ghide on others. But, for Maria Jenkins arcs and whatnot, I recall there being a lot off villain players online so I couldn't get up a team to do the AVs. It's part of the reason I got a second account - one character to do the tanking, the other to do the damage. (or buffing, while one does damage)

I must be the only person who actually likes CoV's zones. I don't know if it's because I started playing shortly after CoV came out, but Rogue Isles really is a quite special place to me.

[Winter Fable]

I did not like that the devs split the player base.Lets see it was COV,AE,Going Rogue and then Incarnate stuff.We just did not have the player base for it.Then there were all the chat channels tf,sg,and so many others which made it really hard for new people to find teams.I understand as a game gets older people form clicks but by having so many the last year or two teaming was tough,even on servers like freedom.My list of friends just got smaller every year.Hopefully if we get the game back more people will be aware we need to be inclusive.

[Ankhammon]

I did not like that the devs split the player base.Lets see it was COV,AE,Going Rogue and then Incarnate stuff.We just did not have the player base for it.Then there were all the chat channels tf,sg,and so many others which made it really hard for new people to find teams.I understand as a game gets older people form clicks but by having so many the last year or two teaming was tough,even on servers like freedom.My list of friends just got smaller every year.Hopefully if we get the game back more people will be aware we need to be inclusive.

I mostly agree with you. The player base did get split up by the form of the game and it got to the point that you had to research the server you were on to get into the right chat channels. And this was limiting in finding team members for anything.

But lets remember why many of those chat channels got created in the first place. A lot of it had to do with being able to ignore general player spams over silly stuff.
How many times were you trying to find a team for something only to be drowned out by 3 billion and 1 Chuck Norris jokes or an argument between two or three individuals or shout outs for liking pie or...

Sometimes it was just too loud on gen chat to get anything done.

And I mostly played on Infinity which was not exactly on the most populated list.

[Dev7on]

What bothers me the most of what I don't like is when Paragon Studios killed off Statesman and Sister Psyche. I'm still trying to figure it out why they did that. They killed the MASCOT of City of Heroes!

[GenericHero05]

I LOVED everything about this game. The depth of that love diminished greatly after issue 5.  Still loved it but hated losing:  crazy herding missions, spawning gobs upon gobs of pets, perma hasten and mission debt (kind of made every mission a little scarey).  I had a lot of friends leave after issue 5.

What I REALLY loved about this game was back in the Summer of 2004 I purchased CoH at the local GameStop. I had never ventured into MMO land but all my co-workers were playing. I was hooked from the start. Actually, the only reason I initially played was that there was this really hot girl at work who was playing and I figured that by playing the game and teaming up with her we would sort of be hanging out together after work (even if it was only on the computer).

My first character was an Electrical/Electricity Blaster. Trying to be comical, I named him Sir Cumcision and he fought the good fight on the Infinity server. Needless to say, that name was nerfed by CoH after about 2 weeks of playing. I was given the name GenericHero05 which I actually decided to keep for the duration.

By the way, it worked. I married that hot girl in 2006.

Before the shutdown, our kids had heroes in the game.

THAT'S what I truly loved about this game!

[Power Gamer]

What bothers me the most of what I don't like is when Paragon Studios killed off Statesman and Sister Psyche. I'm still trying to figure it out why they did that. They killed the MASCOT of City of Heroes!

Because they know the end was coming.

[Safehouse]

I liked that the studio was clearly working toward something really big - the fact that they had an ongoing and proceeding plot. I would have loved to see Battalion.

I liked that, no matter how far in the game you progressed, they had content for both teamers and soloers. You weren't required to team up if you didn't want to.

I liked both the fact that there was so much variety to costumes, and the fact that costume pieces or "gear" did not determine your stats. I liked the fact that there was no "combat rating" by which people determined your worthiness.

I liked that people in this game accepted, for the most part, that it was just a game and they didn't take it too seriously. Good sportsmanship, from what I saw.

Only in CoH did I have a toon that perfectly, and I mean perfectly represented the main character of my novel. I could even write his back story!

I liked that you had access to all of your powers. You could organize them and such, but you didn't have to create "loadout trays" just to use certain powers. It really gave the sense of getting stronger and learning all the cool things you could do with your powers. A real life superhero wouldn't have "loadouts." A real life superhero would just learn more. I liked that a lot, and I didn't even realize how blessed I was to have that. Also loved the incarnate system.

I really did not like when they removed the five starting contacts and made them one. Sorry, Matthew Habashy was nice and all, but when there were five starting contacts, there was more variety to the beginning of your game.

I think the free-to-play model was pretty broken. Then again, f2p is a complicated balance, and can be hard to implement in a game that has been pay-to-play for so long.

I wish blasters had gotten more love - they were SO CLOSE to doing just that, too!

CoV needed some more light. It just seemed too dingy and dark all the time. I like my villains with a little bit of light. I liked my heroes with a little bit of dark. I always felt that the villains=dark, heroes=light stereotype needed to be put to bed.

The graphics could have used some serious updating.

In truth, those are all nitpicking things. I adored this game. I still miss it, pushing two years since it was shuttered. I have dreams about it. I watch videos of gameplay. Even with the things I disliked, I would have changed nothing. It was one game that I was willing to accept, tiny, almost unnoticeable warts and all.

[Ironwolf]

I liked most directions the game went in but my main issue was PvP.

It was not thought out. CoX PvP assumes everyone's roll is to kill the other player. I expected a vastly different way to play.

I wanted:

1. various mission type scenarios Capture the Flag, Escort the NPC, Briefcase retrieval and other such staples of FPS games.
2. Buffable items - walls, doors and so on. Where a defender could throw up a shield on it just like in the Reactor Respec TF
3. Player created maps - the AE should have been made for PvP.
4. Player designed PvP - let the players find a style that worked - with all of the AE strengths if you could edit the maps, power balance inside AE and allow a custom control players would have made a type of PvP that would have been amazing.

This is what I would like to see in any of the replacement or CoH2 games. I was so incredibly disappointed when AE wasn't PvP based.

[Ankhammon]

How do you stop a teleporter in capture the flag? 

[Power Gamer]

Environment, minefield, sharks with fricken lazer beams attached to there heads.