When you've played the best, it's hard to stomach the rest.
I tried the other Super-Hero games out there again, but due to combat mechanics and teaming constraints, I end up soloing 95% of the time.
I finally decided that if I had to solo in an MMO, I might as well not bother with it.
I've got tons of games I haven't touched in the last 8 years due to a pre-occupation with the best Super-Hero game available. So, until we get some really good news about CoH, it's back to the solo strategy and flight sims that I've enjoyed as well as the newer stuff that's come out since 2004.
But I'll be keeping an eye out here, with hope for a Super Future!
I think that one thing CoH did very well was being very casual and very PUG friendly, without requiring it for advancement.
Teams could, pretty much any set of characters, from any power sets, as long as people trusted in the powers to work well (characters could be made terrible sorta by taking 3000 pool powers that don't really do much together, but you kind of had to work at being terrible like that). And for the most part, the powers did work as advertised. You didn't have to pour through arcane texts to figure out if the power was BSing you or not. As long as somebody remembered the general rule to only take 3 SOs of the same thing, they could make a decently slotted character with minimal knowledge of the game system and it'd work out for ED fine. Optimization worked as an optimal factor, something to do to tweak up your high level guys, and not as the de-facto only way to play.
I'd never been in a team that absolutely had to kick people would because they decided to roll Fire or something, except maybe on ITF.
There was never really like "Oh god, you rolled a stalker, ugh, just quit the game". There wasn't like "Oh, you're only in orange IOs? Oh god, just leave the super group already.".
The sidekicking and later 'Super Sidekicking' systems really made it so that if you had consistent friends you played with, you were already go for a game. You didn't have to plan your games out around everybody's life because if your guy got a few levels higher, guess what? Nothing happens. Only somebody vain would care that somebody else's guy was a higher level.
I haven't found a game yet that does teams right. Every game falls into one pit trap or another, that I've played.
Champions Online limits your teams to 5 guys, and pretty much PUNISHES you for teaming for the most part. Because it relies on so many 'outdoor' missions and not instances and the game counts everybody's kills and objectives separate, often 'collect 10 of this' became 'collect 50 of this', because you had 5 team members. It basically BEGGED everybody to split up and solo that content.
If there wasn't anything that would make me want to never talk to another player in a game better, it's a guy jumping in line to start a quest as you're clearing out the mobs around it so that they don't interupt your quest dialogue. UUuugh.
Star Trek Online basically just straight up punished you full score for being in a team for anything other than the fleet actions, which were only really then good if you just didn't feel like doing the story, by making all your Bridge Officers up and vanish from the world. You could build up a team that was pretty much better than what most players had to offer out of NPCs.
At least those games cribbed the super sidekick system.
Star Wars TOR isn't much better, either. Sure, it rewards you in XP rather than deducting you, but it has the same 'outdoors' problem that Champions had, and it punished your story if you rolled with anbody who wanted to roll a different alignment, or the same class or what not.
Then Star Wars completely fails to have any way for people of different levels to play together, so if you have friends in the game, you better get used to playing with them and NEVER on your own, otherwise you're going to basically tank the whole balance of the game entirely.
That and 4 character per team is PRETTY weak. My consistent gaming group can't even all play the game together because one of us will have to sit out because of the team limitation. That's pretty weak. Not to mention that none of us can play it without everybody anyways without throwing everything off the rails.
Then you get overly item dependent games like the 500 pound gorilla where if you're basically not kitted out perfectly then nobody wants to play with you, or if you don't roll THE OPTIMIZED guy, the game basically just drops you like a hot coal.
Uuugh.
