So I wrote a Review/Post-Mortem/Overview of CoH's Lifespan

[SeaLily]

http://www.giantbomb.com/city-of-heroes/3030-19796/user-reviews/2200-25645

If I don't link anyone to this nobody will ever see it and wonder how much time I wasted writing it, so there you go.

CoH has been on my mind a lot lately, and I really needed to get this out of my system somehow.  It's kind of long, and some bits I probably didn't quite remember correctly or put in the right order, but oh well.  All my memories of the game, encapsulated in an article and tossed out onto the internet.

Feels kind of freeing.

Though I do hope the game comes back eventually.

[Ironwolf]

Well done with only a few things I saw differently.

I agree on the farming part of the AE - but it also brought a ton of goods to the Market thereby lowering overall prices.

[Nebularian]

Well done...
And I agree about the AE Farming. I knew people that did nothing else in the game....Their entire focus was creating a toon, getting it to 50...repeat ad nausem.

Yes, I indulged in a few farm runs now and then....but there is the key  NOW AND THEN. And usually, the goal was not just to quickly level...but hang out with friends.

But I do recall getting a bit irritated when some of these farmers would actually try to PLAY the game....suddenly...omg...the levels weren't coming fast enough and there was a chance their toon could get (gasp) defeated!  The Horror.

And what do these guys do....head back to AE....Usually right in the middle of a battle because they discovered their precious toon wasn't invulnerable outside AE LOL

[SeaLily]

Yeah, I'm worried I laid it on a bit thick in that section, but in my mind that was about where I lost interest in the game, and a lot of the long-term problems it had started.  Other than PvP, which was it's own long-term problem, but didn't really affect much outside of itself.

Not that I didn't help push a character or two through some slow levels with a little bit of farming, but the people who were able to go from 1-50 in a single day were probably the worst symptom of the whole thing.

I look at what Cryptic is doing with their Foundry system in Neverwinter, and I wish we'd had CoH last long enough to get that Architect Revamp the devs briefly discussed during their conversations about what else was planned, after the shutdown was announced.  There was some cool stuff coming for it.

Oh well.

[Tenzhi]

I remember being in a few farms shortly after AE's debut.  I get fed up with lack of progress sometimes, and I'm always annoyed at the low level play, at which point becoming an XP sponge doesn't bother me in the slightest.  Besides, for awhile that was about all people were recruiting for it seemed like. 

When that furor died down, though, teams of any sort became a scarcity for me.  People rarely seemed to be advertising for them, and invites from people searching almost never came in any more.  Where once I could log in and generally expect to fall into a team in 20 minutes or less, I could log in and play all day long without getting any invites or seeing anyone advertising team openings (AE or otherwise).

[Captain Electric]

This is going to come of as extremely contrary, so bear in mind it's not me being a dick, it's me being passionate. I really liked so much of what I read--and I'll get to that. But first, I must spring to the defense of...

How We Created Worlds
(Srs rant, haz a title)

Your thing about Mission Architect. It's wrong. I get how it's right for you. But it's right for you because of what you chose to see, not because of what was actually there.

City of Heroes in March, 2009 was my introduction to the game. Issue 14: Mission Architect. All you old-timers, just imagine starting at that point, all the STUFF there was to do. And you didn't just experience it, you went there and helped bring whole chunks of existence into it.

After a while, the ratings system for Mission Architect became unreliable as we all know, and the farming and exploits were running rampant. Then, suddenly, the exploits were fixed and there was some kind of ruckus over that--but let me tell you, neither of those eras much affected the actual community of story writers and fans that had gathered around this wonderful story-telling tool. The official forums had a busy sub-forum for discussing and reviewing user-created story arcs. Rating and review websites sprung up. There was a healthy community of authors and followers. Those of us who used AE for its intended purpose remained intensely satisfied.

There were contests, compelling plot discussions and debates, reviewers started to pop up who garnered much respect from authors, and super groups were using AE to chronicle their personal and group-wide arcs. Everyone had their favorite authors; mine were Evangel, Turgenev, and Neon Rider (the list goes on and on, but those were some of my favorites). Evangel and Turgenev's work was so consistently impressive, they grew their own little fan-bases. Players followed their work with eagerness and anticipation. "Dr. Aeon" McCann, a content designer at Star Trek Online, got his start writing mission arcs as a City of Heroes player and later worked for Paragon Studios. Neon Rider was my top favorite, but he stuck to making story arcs for his super group. Not many people knew about his work. But you better believe I was in any super group he was in. For the first few months, I was really suspicious that he was actually a real comic book writer. The guy could whip up the most prolific comic book story-arcs, you'd forget you were in Mission Architect.

You know, I really am sorry that people didn't get the awesome loot they wanted, or XP, or tickets, or whatever it was people seemed to think was wrong with this deeply rewarding feature. I remember people complaining that "everyone abandoned AE", but nothing had changed for those of us who were using it to tell and experience each others stories. This was also long after many of those who took AE seriously stopped using the AE building in Atlas Park. And I guess, you know, people in instances were...off in instances. (And personally, I always felt like the system rained tickets down on me.)

There was a huge community around AE. I visited the past Freedom Phalanx from the 1930s, based on the official novel. I explored other worlds and dimensions. I remember the day before Galaxy City was destroyed, when the festivities died down, I begged Beastyle to come with our team on a fan-made prologue to the meteor strike. That was shortly before he left and I like to think we left him with a good memory. That was one of the best stories ever, a solemn and respectful lead-up to the catastrophe.

The last story I did was Turgenev's "Ghost in the Machine" and anyone who did that knows how fitting it was for a final arc. It's about a heroine who you're attempting to rescue from a controlled area of the Mission Architect system in the Isles. You develop a close friendship throughout the story, but in the end learn that her body is long-dead, she exists only digitally and can never escape her fate.

We created worlds. All the politics, all the controversy, it was all happening in some far away place.

[Ironwolf]

Oh - I loved the ME - I even had a few specific characters I wanted to get to SO's quickly and ran a few solo AE arc's to get to 22 quickly. I can honestly say I only ever Power leveled one character to 50 and that was Duck Dodgers a tribute character and I deleted him because I had no passion involved in his evolution.

I would have loved a veterans bonus at the 8 year mark where I could start any character at 22.

I thought overall your experience was close to mine. I did however become a bit overly sad over the ED issue which killed a great group of friends. I saw our SG go from 50+ to 12 in 2 months. After that I had a hard time joining SGs again and would often play for years on end with just pickup teams. I loved making characters that could carry an entire team on my back if necessary.

A Sonic/Ice Blaster (Tank) who could tank most AV's and even stood up to Recluse for 30 whole seconds in a States TF after the tank died. My team was amazed that I was able to pull him off everyone else and even keep him on me until the tank rezzed. But all in all your tale was well told.

[SeaLily]

ED is a weird thing.  Ultimately, it was the best thing they could have done for the game in terms of build diversity and keeping players from just powering through all of the game's content.  But it weakened players in significant ways.  If the game had launched with ED in place, nobody would ever have complained about it- but as a post-launch change it made a lot of people feel slighted or lied to.

Reminds me of Champions Online adjusting the EXP curve to be about twice as long the day after the game launched.  Anyone who had played the beta was frustrated with the slower progression, but anyone who came in afterwards wouldn't even notice.

As for my experience with mission architect varying from other people's- yeah.  I'm sure not everyone had the same experience.  I'm also sure a lot of people had a much more enjoyable endgame than I did, enjoyed raiding Hamidon much more than I did, and managed to play all of the task forces and strike forces- which I didn't.  I also never got a villain to level 50(34 was the highest I got redside) and I only ever did one of the Strike Forces.  I'm not saying that my experience is everyone's experience, by any stretch, it's just what I saw happen, what I felt happen, and the things my friends and I talked about in-game while it was going on.

I also left out the entirety of my experience with the roleplay community, which was largely positive, and heavily involved the Mission Architect after it's introduction.  I even made a number of missions and story arcs myself- though I doubt anyone here played them.  ("A European Vacation, or, The Faceless Threat" was the favorite of the ones I'd made myself, though I needed to rebalance it... and never got the chance).

[JaguarX]

AE- very fun at first with some interesting storylines but soon buried beneath too much farm stuff. It was even difficult for me to find an AE team that wasn't about farming. Thus after a while of tiring of digging through tons of farm missions to find a good mish that wasn't popular with the dev award became more time consuming than playing the actusl AE arc. So after a while I just left it alone. Great feature but ended up being a mere gift drop to farmers.

ED seemed good and bad. For those that played in ED days felt severely erakened but at the same time more variety of characters came to being. There was some FoTMs but instead of being on a team with a scrapper that did awesome damage but couldn't hit crap without build up and waiting for that scrapper to fight fir ten seconds and rest for 30 or so, people stared to build more rounded toons. And for those that came after ED it was normality to them.

My favorite time period was
round i7-i12. Lot of people doing things even base raids but after it seemed even forming a team for a TF took long time and after half the team standing around waiting for enough people mist wanted to map tour the missions due to running out of time ir the growing view that mission are not fun and a mere chore standing in the way if adding their 56th level 50. I started to wonder were there anyone else that enjoyed playing? After soloing the content I could I left as being on teams were the other members gave the vibe that they are doing ut because they are forced to wasn't no fun for me.

[Cobra Man]

I liked that article and I agree with the part on AE.

AE was catastrophic for our game and you could argue that it contributed to the ultimate demise of CoH.

[SeaLily]

I don't think it 'contributed to the demise' of the game, but it certainly led to a lot of confused players hitting lv50, seeing that there was nothing to do, and quitting.  Odds are that those guys would probably have quit upon realizing there was no endgame, regardless, but that certainly sped it along when the devs could have squeezed an extra month or two out of them.  ;)

[Aggelakis]

I liked that article and I agree with the part on AE.

AE was catastrophic for our game and you could argue that it contributed to the ultimate demise of CoH.

I disagree vehemently.

[ukaserex]

I liked that article and I agree with the part on AE.

AE was catastrophic for our game and you could argue that it contributed to the ultimate demise of CoH.

You could argue it, but I suspect there would be a large number of folks who would suggest that CoH's demise was a result of
1) US economy (and thus most of the world's economy) going in the toilet, figuratively speaking. Fewer jobs, less money for pleasure pursuits.
2) Increased competition. Champions Online, SWTOR, to name a couple. I noticed a stark difference in the number of folks on my server, at least, after each respective game went live. Yes, some did come back - but they either split time, or didn't play as often. (seemed to me, anyway)
3) Computer upgrades - and this is debatable, I suppose. When CoH came out, 2 gigs of RAM was super plenty to run without lag, as long as you had a broadband connection, or even dial-up, really. Every computer is going to bottleneck somewhere, but initially, it wouldn't bottleneck because of 2 gigs of RAM. However, as time passed and broadband connections became more common, and Pentium 4's became obsolete, it seemed to me that a large number of folks had computers that simply could not handle the game. Whether it was bloated code on the server side, inconsistent ISP connectivity, or too much porn on the user side, I can't possibly say - but something was leading a lot of players to play other games because for whatever reason, the player couldn't enjoy the game - though that was no fault of the lore, or the game's richness of content.
4) A simple lack of player retention - and, dare I say it, f2p. Yeah, I read what Posi said about the concept being very lucrative, but I would submit if the game had stayed sub only and they still had those nifty things in the cash shop, those same people would still have spent all that loot, less the 15 bucks for the sub each month.


In conclusion, all those points are debatable, and are largely my opinion.

As for my thoughts on AE, I enjoyed @burnin up's mission the most for the comedy. @PW (or was it @Police Woman?) was pretty clever in his arcs as well. Some of the fire farms were very amusing and I would use those to get my rare salvage when the ebil marketeers would hike the price of certain rare salvage over 2million. I had over 100 billion, but it was the principle of the thing.

The market, AE, incarnate trials, costume contests, seasonal specials like the ski slopes -- all of them formed a game that was pretty special to some, very, very special to a few and simply a game to even more.

The good news is that soon - (time is relative, is it not?) - there will be another game that may ease the sense of loss.

[MaidMercury]

You could argue it, but I suspect there would be a large number of folks who would suggest that CoH's demise was a result of
1) US economy (and thus most of the world's economy) going in the toilet, figuratively speaking. Fewer jobs, less money for pleasure pursuits.
2) Increased competition. Champions Online, SWTOR, to name a couple. I noticed a stark difference in the number of folks on my server, at least, after each respective game went live. Yes, some did come back - but they either split time, or didn't play as often. (seemed to me, anyway)

The good news is that soon - (time is relative, is it not?) - there will be another game that may ease the sense of loss.

I agree about the economy. It was a factor with the younger crowd since they generally make less money being new than seasoned full time workers. That and just owning an iphone or something costs boo coo bucks for service.

I also think CoH was missing something in the enemies. Sure, they threw rocks at you, shot energy and put holds, but there was not much gun fire or any grenades tossed back. They were kind of predictable, too. I imagine some games like Halo, Call of Duty, Far Cry have more sense of danger seeing they attract a lot of players that see themselves as anti-heroes. The enemies could be fellow players which makes more element of surprise. One had to go to PvP or Bloody Bay to find such a similar battlefield.

Perhaps 'Going Rogue' may have been CoH's attempt to get the 'anti-hero' crowd....not sure.

Myself, I grew to like the social networking aspect of it. I played missions zillions of times because my friends were there in this virtual world. The new ones would 'invite' me and I would exempt to be able to join them.

I could wear outrageous costumes and be....normal. :roll:

There is no substitute game 'around' the corner that would return the wonder I had from City of Heroes. 2nd Life might give me some of the social graces of it but it wouldn't have any of the comic book Superhero fun to it....I'm not into Goth, Elves, Dragons, etc, so World of Warcraft would be a complete waste of my time.