Reply from contact at Google!

[Menrva Channel]

I too, have gone to WoW and it is just NOT anywhere near what CoH was. There's no community there, that I've found, like that on CoH. no teaming like CoH. It just seems to be more of a solo play to me. CoH was the first MMORPG game I'd ever played and I don't believe that there is any other game out there that can take it's place. Oh WoW holds my attention for a while but there's no "Marathon" all nighters or hours on end play time like there was on CoH. DCUO, STOL, Rift, Champions, and Tank something or other. Not one of them grabbed my interest. Champions I tried years ago when it first came out. Didn't like it then, don't like it now. DCUO and STOL, not bad but just couldn't get interested in them. I just couldn't get into Rift and the Tank MMO bored me so much I can't even remember the full name!  :-[ WoW, well just a stopping point till CoH comes back.

I regularly disappoint my self by going to YouTube and watch the many fine videos there of CoH. Should probably stay away from them I get so damned depressed after watching one or two!  :'(

I found the same problem with WoW. I have friends who I played City of with that I joined in WoW... and it just isn't the same. No matter what I was doing in CoX, I always felt connected to the others. We could all be on different missions, TFs, and such--but we could all chat in the same channel--even on opposing sides! With WoW... even in the same Guild... it feels... disconnected. And teaming just doesn't feel the same.  The events are neat and mostly fun. They have some really great content... but I miss the global chat channels and the community. I also really miss the cooperative nature of City of that you don't really find in WoW. WoW is a nice game it's just... not... my City. :(

And don't get me started on Champions... I had to download that for over six hours. I got picky during character creation and played for two minutes before getting frustrated and uninstalled. DCU never appealed to me. It looked like a single player game only online and maybe able to play with others. 

[dwturducken]

I play WoW solo, as well, except occasionally with a friend who has been playing it since shortly after release. It's not really an off line game for me, because there always seem to be other players around. I get the usual whisper-invites to join guilds (since blocking guild requests doesn't actually block those...), but I'm usually left alone. Now, while the general chat channel is full of unicorny dross, the actual players around me are mostly cool. There is the occasional kill-steal, but, for the most part, everyone stays out of everyone else's business. If one player is in over his/her head in an aggro, and another player is in range, help is usually given without question, offer or request, but that's about it.

[JaguarX]

I play WoW solo, as well, except occasionally with a friend who has been playing it since shortly after release. It's not really an off line game for me, because there always seem to be other players around. I get the usual whisper-invites to join guilds (since blocking guild requests doesn't actually block those...), but I'm usually left alone. Now, while the general chat channel is full of unicorny dross, the actual players around me are mostly cool. There is the occasional kill-steal, but, for the most part, everyone stays out of everyone else's business. If one player is in over his/her head in an aggro, and another player is in range, help is usually given without question, offer or request, but that's about it.

Yup.

The problem is there isnt going to be another community like COX in any game besides COX, there isnt going to be teaming, or game feel like COX except for COX. That is what made COX very special. It had it's own feel. The down side is when a game like that closes, there is nothing like it. If there was other games like it or COX was like other games, then it would be easier to fall into another game like nothing happened but the down side is that COX would have merely another game among the thousands of other games.

I like WoW in a sense that I didnt feel the force of teaming or having to team or worried about getting a team. I liked the solo feel in games personally. COX mostly offered both although I think they threw a few more bones and meat to the teamers but that is a discussion for another thread, but over all a person could solo and team. In most other games teaming is optional but it doesnt seem to be encouraged and or required for much or have as much advantages for teaming. In COX, you level fast as hell from 1-50 on teams with any build. Solo, it'sa slow roll and even slower roll with certain builds.

Overall in WoW people are generally nice, plenty of people around, but I didnt like the lore and enjoy the game over all, but there are guilds and people that like to socialize. What you feeling may be how many people who had difficulty finding teams in COX. To many vets they knew the ins and outs and how to form groups, how to talk, the SGs and all, but to a newbie, they can feel left out and feel not much interaction. But that same newbie in COX, is the social bug in a game like WoW and cant see how people say there is no community and such and it's easy to integrate if they tried and usual stuff that go along with it.

But it sucks, after many years of playing a game, a person get used to that game and other games feel alien in many ways everything from the community to movement to powers to social norms.

But usually the gripe about WoW in game and out is usually that it's too guild (team) centric. It's nice to hear the other side to that where I thought it seemed solo friendly among other players running about. Most players I know there dont even play in a guild.

[Segev]

Apologies for what is hopefully a temporary thread hijack, but would you mind elaborating a bit on what made CoX's teaming so unique, to you?

[JaguarX]

Apologies for what is hopefully a temporary thread hijack, but would you mind elaborating a bit on what made CoX's teaming so unique, to you?

The sidekick system

[Segev]

So pulling people together in level so there isn't a "LFG level X" requirement?

[JaguarX]

So pulling people together in level so there isn't a "LFG level X" requirement?

Yea

[eabrace]

So pulling people together in level so there isn't a "LFG level X" requirement?

That, more than anything, is what I find myself bitching about non-stop in every other game I bother to play anything but solo.

[Ironwolf]

Understand the original "sidekick" was a bit of a mess and was ripe for exploiting for powerleveling.

This caused a huge thread on how to fix power leveling. I can honestly claim the Super Sidekick system as my one and only idea used in the game. My idea was a similar system to the TF system with a twist. All players would be set to the level of the mission hold with powers at +3 (like you could slot +3 enhancements). Then you would have a mission slider that would allow for harder or easier completion.

Now the Devs took that and tweaked it slightly - they made it +5 for powers - added the AV/Elite and everything else was actually almost word for word from my post! If you have ever been on the official forums you know how few ever agreed with ANYTHING - I had 6 pages of agreed and +1's!

The Sidekick Mach 2 was just an effort to stop the insane - level 46 bridge - requests and have players actually PLAY the game instead of doorsit.

[JaguarX]

Understand the original "sidekick" was a bit of a mess and was ripe for exploiting for powerleveling.

Oh yeah. That sidekick system. Yeah that was open for too much exploits. I was a btit shocked it lasted as long as it did.

I liked the and was referring to the then current way, just in case someone somewhere got confused.

[Nitekilla]

Apologies for what is hopefully a temporary thread hijack, but would you mind elaborating a bit on what made CoX's teaming so unique, to you?

Sidekick System
Ability to change the difficulty
It is not necessary to have a Tank, Healer , Damage dealer setup
You can actually see the power animations of the other teammates which is cool graphically
Your are not limited to 4-6 player teams (you could have up to 8)
You can actually see your teammates on the world map and tp them

[NeoFight]

Apologies for what is hopefully a temporary thread hijack, but would you mind elaborating a bit on what made CoX's teaming so unique, to you?

People. Peeps. Friends. Confidants. Heroes. Bartenders. And that darn Rikti that got me killed several times.  She tried to help... she really did !

[LaughingAlex]

Having alternatives to supporting a team besides healing, like debuffing mobs to being nearly harmless, or buffing teammates to godhood.  The ability to make a difference besides just healing or dealing damage or taking hits was the core reason I played City of heroes.  I hated when I played guild wars when there were no "healers" around, because then we waited for an hour or two before resorting to getting a monk henchman who was very prone to getting killed with stupidity, which caused the whole team to automatically lose many times.  The game had debuffs they still didn't make enough of a difference, nore did buffs in a protracted fight.  So we waited forever.  In city of heroes, the wait time was very low, only when the team leader was very ignorant and thought everyone needed a healer did waiting occur(at which point i'd often move on, especially if I was a defender/corruptor/controller).

I also found the community was for the most part, far more open minded then just about any gaming community i'd met before.  The unreal crowd?  Eh, "The rocket launcher looks difference, this change is too much!".  Guild wars crowd were comprised of to many immature jerks to me.  But the city of heroes crowd?  I didn't see to many immature idiots playing, in fact I thought it was a very mature gaming crowd, that also helped one another(the only exception being the above ignorant player who hated knockback and demanded a healer all the time but those were very rare).

The game was also challenging in legitimate ways, rather than fake difficulty.  I try champions online, and I find it's never hard at all, the mobs do almost nil for damage, one time I had my eyes off the screen for 20-30 seconds and a henchman hasn't even taken off a third of my health bar, and I had no defensive passive on, only an aura of primal majesty giving me the most neglegable health buff.  If my passive was a dedicated defensive I don't even think i'd have noticed my health bar drop any.  In city of heroes however I had to actively USE my powers, or even a few minions could take me down sometimes.  When I looked on the boards way back, crybabies would whine that CoX had "THUGS kicking my butt!", well, I found the mobs got tougher and weren't just average street gangs.  In CO?  Even the elite soldiers of viper are hardly tougher then the average cobra gangster in proportion to ya.  Only difference was the levels and the numbers, but thats it.  I miss city of heroes, big time.

[KSinclaire]

Honestly, the biggest sell for me when it came to teaming in CoX - and something almost no other MMO I played before it or since has gotten anywhere close to right - was how well it *encouraged* people to team up together.

First, the UI for teaming - and for finding people to team with - was both intuitive and fairly simple to use. Add to that the later LFG channel, and it became all the easier to find people at any time of the day or night.

Second, and the big one for me - rewards being handed out at the ends of missions, rather than when you turned them in. (Story arcs notwithstanding). This meant that people of any level could team together on any team members' content and not lose out on experience and inf. simply because it wasn't their mission being run. This made all the easier by having multiple choices of repeatable content: it wasn't just 'run to contact A, finish their missions, then run to contact B' - there were lots of things for teams to engage in.

I'd go so far as to consider this CoH's most understated feature, in my opinion - something that by all rights should have set a precadent for the MMORPG industry; and yet barely gets a nod whenever anyone talks about it.

[Osborn]

That, more than anything, is what I find myself bitching about non-stop in every other game I bother to play anything but solo.

For me, it went even farther than that, in that it helped keep my friends on a capable playing field with each other. Especially after they got rid of the 'no XP for exemplaring down' thing. That's way, waaaay more important to me than it making it slightly easier to find a PUG.

Not withstanding games where it actively discourages teamwork or there is no reason to team for anything except rare content at end-game (Champions Online, Star Trek Online, I'm looking at you), or games that are empty where it's rare to find anybody to play with, period, I've never had much of a problem finding a reasonable PUG. Especially not in CoH. Even before the 'Team Sidekick' thing.

If you have a thousand people on then there's a good chance that at least some of them are within 3-4 levels of you.

My problem in other games is that it's hard to play with friends. Oh, I can fire up most games and find SOMEbody willing to do a mission or quest or whatever. But when you have 1-7 persistent friends who have different levels of commitment to the game, it becomes nearly impossible to play, without one of you basically quitting the game until somebody else can catch up.

In almost every other game, I have to have 1 character per combination of my friends: One character to play with just my boyfriend, one character to play with my boyfriend and his brother, one to play with just his brother, etc.. because that's the only way to play the game at all without leaving somebody behind. If I'm limited to 2 characters, then basically I have to literally quit playing a game whenever any one of like 7 people can't make it.

I never had that problem in CoH. Between the character slots I had from Veteran's Tokens giving me like 20 slots on Virtue, and the fact that even if I break out a very high over leveled guy it wouldn't ruin their or my day to use them, I could play with who I wanted, when I wanted.

I didn't have to worry about like "Oh, well, my boyfriend wants to play, but I can't, because it'll leave my other friend behind and then he can't play with us never again". I didn't have to worry about "So and so wants to play the game but I'm not in the mood so I'm ruining it for everybody". We would play the content we wanted when we wanted. If somebody wanted to get on and do some raid or a taskforce or get some badge or whatever? No problem. You'd hop on and if you got extra XP or whatever, fine! If you were a level too high? Whatever! You could go in with your friend on their level and do whatever you wanted.

You didn't have to worry about like.. "Oh, this mission is a waste of time and will only give me 1/2 experience, and give my friend 0 XP because I've already done it".

I really did like how everybody would get a reward for participating even if it wasn't 'their' arc. It didn't force everybody to stay on the exact same story path.

I find in most other games that, we have to plan out a story path ahead of time and basically stick to it and never deviate or see any other content because splitting up your time shuts doors permanently.

In most other games the content never levels with you either, so if a mission is for like.. level 9, you better do it right away or it's going to become a waste of time too.

There's not a lot of content in most other games, really, but I'll probably see even less of it because it's just so easy to out level your friends or the content so you have to basically like.. not play the game at all.. to play the game.

[Joshex]

bottom line is that unlike every other MMO CoH is not the kind of playerbase that has little interaction with eachother other than general PWNing.

thats bassically the difference that other MMO developers who were trying to capitalize on CoH's shutdown failed to realize, we don;t play to pwn or be pwned, we play because the game has content and friendly faces. even if a few of these faces may be a little deranged or assylum bound, still at least they are happy people that know how to get allong.

CoH + PVP = structured events where no one really gets pwned, it's a friendly fight where both parties pleasantly talk, I was gladly part of the last friday night fight on protector. me and 2 other oppenents in warburg but still fun. I miss warburg.. everytime I hear abotu north korea in the news I badly want to go launch a nuke in warburg.

[Mistress Urd]

The other thing that CoH fixed was the rewards for teaming. Some games will divide XP by # of players. CoH did something like that at first and players figured out that at around 4 adding more people generally slowed XP gain. Thus the greater XP pool for having more people along that we ended up with.

Games like DDO had a different method, the dungeon would give a set ammount of XP reguardless of the number of players. So there was incentive to add players since more players on a mission where the encounters don't scale to the number in the party should be faster.

The most important thing about CoH teaming was that for most of the game's content, all you needed for a team was bring yourself and 7 other bodies.

[drmanbot]

Trying to "Re Rail " this, as it were.

Hoping things are on track for  the presentation, albeit slowly after recent unfortunate events and RL concerns.

[JetFlash]

Games like DDO had a different method, the dungeon would give a set ammount of XP reguardless of the number of players. So there was incentive to add players since more players on a mission where the encounters don't scale to the number in the party should be faster.

DDO has ruined teaming for the casual gamer with the Streak system.  You get an XP bonus for the number of quests in a row done on Hard or Elite.  Made it darn near impossible to get people to run quests and raids on Normal because "they didn't want to break their streak".  Very irritating.

[Mistress Urd]

DDO has ruined teaming for the casual gamer with the Streak system.  You get an XP bonus for the number of quests in a row done on Hard or Elite.  Made it darn near impossible to get people to run quests and raids on Normal because "they didn't want to break their streak".  Very irritating.

So they changed it. I played DDO when it was P2P and saw how badly they botched several other design decisions. Glad I bailed.  :)