Why does it STILL bother me? I think I know...

[Minotaur]

I'm playing Neverwinter now and it really bothers me that Cryptic (who particularly should have learned from CoH) missed so many tricks that would have made their game a lot more fun. Non scaling instances (ie same number/rank of mobs for 1 or 2 players) are particularly galling.   

[Ironwolf]

All Blaster TF? Check
All Corruptor TF? Check
All any AT TF? Check

That was the fun of the game just trying different things. I was on once and a group said - we want a Fire/Fire blaster for a TF. I said sure I have one of those - it turns out they had 7 Kins. I was tank, damage and hyperactive squirrel on crack. I had my nuke up every group and we blitzed through the TF in an amazing time.

[Lycantropus]

That's just the point I was trying to make, though.  Nothing else scratches all my itches at once like CoH does.  Everything I've played or done - before or after - only hits one or maybe two of the things I found in CoH.

I can have a great character creator OR I can have a powerful character OR I can play online OR I can play with people I really like etc etc etc.  OR OR OR OR.   Rather than being any sort of replacement, they wind up reminding me of CoH and how much more I enjoyed it than whatever I'm doing right now.

I want AND, not OR.  CoH was that AND.

I can't argue with you on that. It's the same story for me. I futz around on DCUO which is little better than a 'super hero' simulator to me once I hit 30 because I won't grind nor PuG the 30+ stuff (was disappointed to realize I can't enter a zone I PAID FOR- Central City- because I don't grind enough to get the gear that will even let me enter it) so I play it solo because the controls are too different/weird for my online group. I do the seasonal stuff and the occasional daily "regular hero" stuff where I stop regular thugs.

I currently play The Secret World with my Co* Online group because it's the only thing we can all agree on so far that doesn't suck 'too bad' (though it has it's good moments and upsides too- even though it's still not 'home') we have had our moments, but I can see a line on the horizon as we enter Transylvania and finish the regular content there. I don't think they're going to be able to keep up with our team demands, re-playabilty aside (and since the story content seems to be SOLO for an MMO) at the rate we consume it, and we don't PvP. Not to mention the fact that when the whole 'usual gang' is there it exceeds almost any other MMO's current team limit restrictions.

Co* was perfect for my group and I. Nothing else meets it, and I'm sorry if my post came off sounding a little Pollyanna, but the truth is there's nothing like it out there yet, and we have to make due with what IS for now. Hopefully one of the plan Z's will be our 'next thing' and it may not. Until that 'thing' comes along, we have to find comfort in what IS, or give in to despair.

At any rate, I cant' give in to my despair; that would be the 'easy way' and my little SG deserves better, and still holds together waiting for that 'thing' while making due with what IS.

If I could do more than that, I would.

Lyc

[Ice Trix]

Both the top posts express my feelings exactly.. I made backgrounds for every characyer.. reasons for the powers they picked or didnt.. they each had different motivations many being attached to the game lore.. CoH was a huge creative outlet for me that is simply gone..

This post expresses well & truly how I feel about the top two posts.

All Blaster TF? Check
All Corruptor TF? Check
All any AT TF? Check

That was the fun of the game just trying different things. I was on once and a group said - we want a Fire/Fire blaster for a TF. I said sure I have one of those - it turns out they had 7 Kins. I was tank, damage and hyperactive squirrel on crack. I had my nuke up every group and we blitzed through the TF in an amazing time.

Every TF was an any TF, 90% of the time.

[johnrobey]

*sings "I want my....  I want my....  I want my C.o.H." (sung to the tune of "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits.)   

[Dollhouse]

I currently play The Secret World with my Co* Online group because it's the only thing we can all agree on so far that doesn't suck 'too bad' (though it has it's good moments and upsides too- even though it's still not 'home') we have had our moments, but I can see a line on the horizon as we enter Transylvania and finish the regular content there. I don't think they're going to be able to keep up with our team demands, re-playabilty aside (and since the story content seems to be SOLO for an MMO) at the rate we consume it, and we don't PvP. Not to mention the fact that when the whole 'usual gang' is there it exceeds almost any other MMO's current team limit restrictions.

That's one of my few gripes with TSW (also my 'main' these days), too: the five-man team is too small to accommodate "the crew." Or it was until a few of them put the game on hiatus while waiting for more content...but that's another matter.  We regularly had to leave people out for dungeon runs or a Lair visit, and that sucks.  Unfortunately, a whole bunch of content is balanced for a 5-man team (and the more challenging content for a rather specific sort of team: 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 DPS. It's sadly ironic that in a game with the most flexible, wide-open character development system I've ever seen in an MMO, things still gravitate towards the Holy Trinity. I don't think that was really the devs' intent, either; the trinity happens because it works, and only CoH managed to make it completely unnecessary. That was another amazing accomplishment that's largely unrecognized in the MMO community. 

Don't get me wrong: TSW is the best MMO I've ever played on many, many fronts...but the several areas in which it's deficient to CoH really stand out sometimes. No game before or since CoH handled teaming better, from useful social/teaming tools, to the brilliant auto-exemplar system, etc. No MMORPG has had better "kinetic immersion" (that is, the sense of your character moving in a world with real physical forces acting on them...remember the first time you used Super Jump? Yeah...that's what I mean). And so forth...

[General Idiot]

That's one of my few gripes with TSW (also my 'main' these days), too: the five-man team is too small to accommodate "the crew."

Personally, I want to know why five people became the standard in almost all MMOs except the odd one that decides to be different in completely the wrong direction and make it four instead. Seriously, what's so special about that number that almost every game uses it? Is it just because WoW made it five (In turn because Everquest made it five, I think?) or is there some crucial game design issue I'm completely missing that makes five person teams the best possible choice in all situations?

[srmalloy]

Personally, I want to know why five people became the standard in almost all MMOs except the odd one that decides to be different in completely the wrong direction and make it four instead.

...or being schizoid about it like SWTOR, which has an ops group size of up to 24 characters for Warzone Pvp and world bosses, but regular teams are limited to four (including your companions, so a team of two could each have a companion out, but a team of four would be companion-free), and the Group Finder for flashpoints makes you pick one or more roles from Tank/DPS/Heal and builds teams 1/2/1 to those categories.

[Segev]

Personally, I want to know why five people became the standard in almost all MMOs except the odd one that decides to be different in completely the wrong direction and make it four instead. Seriously, what's so special about that number that almost every game uses it? Is it just because WoW made it five (In turn because Everquest made it five, I think?) or is there some crucial game design issue I'm completely missing that makes five person teams the best possible choice in all situations?

Standards develop out of tradition as much as anything else. A fixed size is needed to help make sure missions can be balanced properly, as it's probably next to impossible to create an algorithm that would procedurally modify balance successfully for arbitrary team sizes. So given the need for any maximum at all, many will gravitate towards what they're used to. So if "everyone else" does 5, so will they.

The Phoenix Project has largely discussed 8, and I can't help but think that it is because, in part, it's what we're used to. What, exactly, would make 9 or 10 "too big?" (I assure you, we've had these discussions, but they're long and incredibly finely nuanced, and even still, we're not 100% confirmed on 8. It's just looking very, very likely right now.)