If we could bring COH back what would you change?

[Absolute]

- NO power proliferation.  I liked having powersets unique to specific ATs - I felt that power proliferation was
way overdone.

I can agree with this a little.

I didn't feel ATs were unique enough that given the exact same powers they were widely different. A Rad/Psi Defense and a Psi/Rad Cor were virtually the same. One debuffed a bit more, the other could crit. If a newbie were to ask me the difference, I'd say there isn't a big enough reason to only go one or the other.

That being said, Psi blast on Blasters and Psi blast on corruptors were very different. I think powersets should have been altered to each AT rather than a direct port. That way you have people who wanted claw brutes happy, while not having Claw/Regen Brutes and Claw/Regen scrappers virtually the same.

[PsychicKitty]

If I could bring it back...I would do a few things..

One I would alter the Mission architect...it should have never given experience points...It should have given more tickets and been a way to get commodities...and other things....maybe costume options....but not enhancements either.

I would change the Auction house.....so that it was a global account auction house....instead of allowing ten trillion characters to each be able to make tons of bids on items...no instead it would be a shared system for all the characters on one account with a connected bank and slot system so you could trade items between characters that way.

I would alter the bases so that the user would have more control and be able to set up actual fighting areas and arenas and race tracks....and have more signs for the bases.

I would go through and revamp many of the missions that people where exploiting to power level and put in cool downs....making it so you would no longer get experience...but instead would get more influence or something else.

I would add in combat pets that you could level and raise independent of the character.

Aside from all that the game did pretty good.

[srmalloy]

If I could bring it back...I would do a few things..

One I would alter the Mission architect...it should have never given experience points...It should have given more tickets and been a way to get commodities...and other things....maybe costume options....but not enhancements either.

Giving experience I don't have an issue with -- whether you're fighting real opponents or electronic hallucinations, you're still learning how to use your powers more effectively. Enhancement and salvage drops, no -- anything like that would be just as 'real' as your opponents, so you wouldn't have anything more than you entered with. Similarly, no influence/infamy/information -- taking the explanation of what 'inf' was from the devs -- a measure of your ability to get people to provide you with assistance (based on either their respect for you, their fear of you, or the information that you have on them or that they want) -- I can't see that crawling up your own electronic navel, no matter how skilled you become as a result, is going to earn you much in the way of respect or fear or real-world data. I have a mental image of a level-50 AE baby trying to buy some enhancements, and the merchant they're talking to is saying "You disappeared into the AE building the day you showed up in Paragon City, and didn't come out until now, and you want some of my targeting optics? What have you done for _me_, or for the _rest_ of Paragon City?"

In compensation, though, the ticket rate should be increased, and for each of the reward options there should be a higher-priced version that let you pick the reward you wanted -- so you could, for example, either take a random roll on the tier-1 Arcane common salvage table for 8 tickets or pay something like 24 tickets to get the Luck Charm you wanted.

[0nehanklap]

Personally, I think that if such a thing as the AE were to exist, it would actually COST you influence (or perhaps SG Prestige) to step inside such a marvelous facility, and the ONLY thing you could take away is the experience.  The energy cast alone to power such a facility would be monumental, along the lines of a small national economy, and developers/engineers would be the highest paid in their fields.

[Garble]

Squealer

At the beginning of each mission there is one foe who, after being defeated, you can click on and bring up a dialogue window where you can interrogate him/her/it. If you chose to intimidate the Squealer for information, the map will reveal the location of all glowies and all foes will apear as moving markers.

That way people who want to quickly stealth through a mission could chose to do so. And there'd be fewer instances of running through a "defeat all" looking for a foe that wandered behind a stack of boxes, or a glowie that you just can't seem to find no matter how many times you go over the whole map.

They added that reveal function eventually, but it was tied to some strange timer and it seemed to take forever. I wanted a way to activate it so I didn't feel helpless to the mission spawning algorithm.

[Safehouse]

Online/Offline mode.

...with environment& rewards equal to MA Test mode when offline.

Thisthisthisthis a thousand times this. With an offline mode, even if the servers went dark (again, in terms of this hypothetical timeline), maybe we could theoretically still play the game - just always offline. In this case no servers = no way to connect to online mode... BUUUUUT no servers does not = no way to play at all. Then again I'm not tech savvy at all so I could be completely wrong on this thought.

[silvers1]

Regarding Mission Architect ... I never liked the concept of it being a simulator inside the game.  I'd prefer something that would actually allow you to place instanced contacts within the world and place mission entrances in the world just like non-MA missions.  It should feel like an actual "real-world" mission.

[trexnco]

This is cool that there is still a COH community out there. I really miss this game and even play in a Mutants and Masterminds game with this as the setting. If I were to change anything about COH...

I'd have spent more time creating new maps. It got terribly monotonous at times running through the same maps over and over and over.

Space adventures! I hope I didnt miss this having left CoH in 2008 or but there were always rumors about cosmic adventures. I wish that had happened. If it did I'm ever sadder.

[srmalloy]

I'd have spent more time creating new maps. It got terribly monotonous at times running through the same maps over and over and over.

This is something I spoke with Positron about at one of the SDCC booths that NCSoft ran. I'm sure that everyone has recognized that the mission maps were made up of 'blocks' of interior that were linked together in various ways -- which cuts down enormously on the work required to create a new map at the cost of seeing the same structures over and over and over again in maps. It seemed to me that the existence of these predefined blocks could be used to allow creation of custom maps, and I asked Positron whether it would be possible to create a 'snap-together' map creator to allow us to create new maps by linking these pre-defined map modules together.

Unfortunately, the map design was still mired in the hand-tweak era. While the blocks did exist in their map designer, there was no linkage mechanism; a map designer could add an entire map block as a unit to a map, but would then have to fiddle with positioning it by hand to get corridors to line up. I'm sure that all the long-term players have encountered a map where a corridor 'ends' in a black wall, and if you walk into the wall, you'll be in the continuation of the corridor, and if you turn around you can see the uninterrupted corridor -- these are map errors where the map designer didn't get the chunks lined up right, and the rendering engine draws a black wall at the join for one side or the other. They would have needed to do a complete restructuring of the data structures for the indoor maps to allow the building blocks to be stored as units with their link points defined, with the map file diagramming how the units linked to each other. Basically, it would have been a rewrite with roughly the same level of effort as power customization, and they already had too many other things they were working on. Still, it was something that he wanted to see done, and I have no doubt that, if the game hadn't been closed down, we would have seen both user-generated maps and a random mission map generator that could have made a significant fraction of door mission maps unique.

[Segev]

This is, incidentally, one of the advantages that the Phoenix Project has as a newer, modern game: we can learn from these sorts of things and build ours to be more easily modular.

[Triplash]

whether it would be possible to create a 'snap-together' map creator to allow us to create new maps by linking these pre-defined map modules together.

Back when I first heard the idea of pitching City's purchase to other companies, my first thought was Runic Games. (They're the company that made Torchlight 1 & 2, and are largely made up of the people that made Diablo 1 & 2.) They had said that one of the possible next steps after TL2 was released, was to make an MMO set in that world. They had already added multiplayer in TL2, and MMO was a step they wanted to take but they were hesitant because of the much higher complexity.

My idea was to pitch to them to pick up CoH, so they could run it in maintenance and use it to study a working MMO from the inside. In time they could also make small additions for it to help familiarize them with developing and releasing content for a live MMO. One of the additions I was going to emphasize was a map randomizer. With Runic's background, they certainly know how to randomize a map seamlessly.

I still think it would be a good idea - and it's much better timing now that TL2 has been released and is stable. Right now they're in that stage where they're considering what project to start next. But as always there's that whole "NCsoft's just not selling" bottleneck.

[Safehouse]

But as always there's that whole "NCsoft's just not selling" bottleneck.

Ahhh there's the rub. Someone's going to have to basically make them an offer that they can't refuse if they want a genuine shot at picking up CoH.

An offer they can't refuse...

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[Segev]

Enchantment and domination spells aren't my strong suit. Now, if you can get some sort of undead in control of the company, I could compel its obedience...

[goodtime]

I would have liked to see a supergroup costume slot.   And the SG leaders could pick and lock pieces and colors.    That way you could have everyone with red flaired boots and gloves, or blue and yellow capes.

Or tails.  Or robot legs.  Or zombie skulls.

[BadWolf]

A Mind Control Mastermind set. Your Minion, Lieutenant and Boss powers would all instablick an enemy (for 0 XP) and give you a pet of the same type, level appropriate. (There'd obviously have to be limits, so you couldn't walk through a mission killing everything with a one-shot, one-kill power, but I think you could overcome it.)

[Safehouse]

A Mind Control Mastermind set. Your Minion, Lieutenant and Boss powers would all instablick an enemy (for 0 XP) and give you a pet of the same type, level appropriate. (There'd obviously have to be limits, so you couldn't walk through a mission killing everything with a one-shot, one-kill power, but I think you could overcome it.)

With that in mind, an illusion control dominator set. I always wanted that and I still do. ILLUSION/MARTIAL DOMINATOR FTW

[Kaos Arcanna]

Something that just occurred to me.

You know what I'd like to see in a returned COH?

Much less Enemy Mez Powers ... or a built in breakfree like Champion Online's "hit the Z" button.

[MaidMercury]

Not too sure what to make of AE.

When it first appeared, the place was FULL of heroes. I had no choice but to hang out there to be invited to a team. It was intriguing to create custom missions...I wouldn't have made it a simulator.

I would have made it a sort of programmable 'contact'...that way you still get custom missions without the simulator. The missions would remain real....just options, like day jobs.
I did like the extra Store to shop at....maybe that's me. :roll:

Same thing when 'Going Rogue' came out. People were all running Apex, Tin Mage, etc.....I felt left out after awhile and went ahead and purchased the pack so I could play on those teams.

[silvers1]

Another couple thngs I would change:

- Remove the unresistable damage attacks commonly found in incarnate trials.  When playing a tank, i found it very frustrating
that my primary power set was fairly useless.  I was just as squishy as anyone else.  Respect the power sets....

- Put back in the "1 shot" rule - used to be no one could be one shot killed by anything.  That went
out the window with the incarnate trials.

[Canine]

I wouldn't change anything.

The bits that I wasn't keen on, other people liked.  Some of the bits that I liked, other people weren't keen on.

The variety of options in the game was what made it IMO, so reducing that based on utterly biased personal opinion would reduce the viability of the game to attract the diverse crowd that made up its community, so I'd leave it as it was.

But that may be because I'd learned to trust Paragon with the game.  If you'd asked me when Cryptic still had the reins, I'd have had a different response, partially because I was younger and naive about MMOs, and partially because I didn't have the hindsight I have now.