That's part of being a game designer, though. You have to keep in mind that sometimes the community is a terrible judge of what should and shouldn't be done. By human nature, the community in general wants instant gratification. As a game designer, you have to try to draw things out as long as you can to keep people paying you money. Ideally, you can strike a balance between the two so that everyone is somewhat happy. Sometimes you just plain can't, and the community gets upset. Sometimes you try but you overshoot a mark, but one thing about an MMORPG is that you can never just sit on the status quo.
All these things are true, but I firmly believe that everyone who was instrumental in CoH
after Jack left did those same these things better than Jack did. Maybe that was Jack's bad luck, or everyone else's good luck. The truth is probably somewhere in between. What I will unreservedly credit Jack and his team with is a fantastic setting for Cryptic's game. Most of the flack I gave him was about seemingly inserting himself in game mechanical balance when he provably didn't know
how the game worked. (In his defense, neither did the guys who were
actually in charge of balance.
)
Now, Jack certainly wasn't a good communicator. By itself, that wouldn't have generated the distaste some parts of the community produced. I do think, though, that it exacerbated the perception that the game needed to cleave to his vision, everything else be damned. I doubt that was really his view, but that vision thing came often enough that he became perceived to have that view. Given that the game at release was about 10,000 miles from his vision in game mechanical terms, that was kind of a big deal.
I feel quite safe in saying pre-ED CoH was no more broken than post-Inventions CoH, and almost certainly less broken than post-Incarnate CoH (especially with IOs thrown in). Don't get me wrong - I personally loved most of the ways
all those things "broke" the game. The point is that the game probably didn't "need" ED in a purist balance sense except that IOs and Incarnates, for any flaws, represented better growth of power over time than getting it all for "free" with pre-ED mechanics. They were probably better versions of how to "break" the game because it took some investment in time to earn them over and above just leveling up and buying SOs.
Ultimately, I believe the furor over ED became what it was mostly because it was a PR fiasco. It was leaked out of CoV closed beta, came on the heels of the GDN (with an attached community interpretation no more similar nerfs were imminent), had an awfully obvious veneer of positive spin attached (that was actually Positron's, not Statesman's), and preceded its "replacement" in the form of Inventions by about 18 months.
Hindsight is 20/20 and all, but at the time, it was painful, and I think it could have been handled much, much better.
All that said, I would risk trusting Cryptic, and thus Jack, at the helm of a revived CoH. ED and all that stuff is water under a bridge far enough back I can't even see it any more. No one now is who they were back then, and Cryptic is the closest thing to a miraculously reformed Paragon Studios actually in existence, by virtue of their past history with the title.
