Do you think the game got TOO user friendly at the end?

[Rust]

I don't think they made the game too easy.  I think they made it more enjoyable for more people.  i do sometimes feel a bit sad that newer people didn't get to have some of the fun the earlier players had.  How many stories have we all read about hovering all the way across the Hollows, or the long trips back from the hospital after getting smacked down yards away from your mission entrance?

I have fond memories of sitting in the Help or Zone General chat of Pinnacle and Virtue and waxing on about the "Way Things Were" to the new folks. Not in a cankerous way, but just sharing the stories of days gone by with the newer generation.

I remember the one that always got the biggest reaction from the "new blood" was reminiscing about Perez Park back in the days when you didn't get a legitimate Travel Power until Level 14.

Go.
Hunt.
Kill Skuls.

[doc7924]

I have fond memories of sitting in the Help or Zone General chat of Pinnacle and Virtue and waxing on about the "Way Things Were" to the new folks. Not in a cankerous way, but just sharing the stories of days gone by with the newer generation.

I remember the one that always got the biggest reaction from the "new blood" was reminiscing about Perez Park back in the days when you didn't get a legitimate Travel Power until Level 14.

Go.
Hunt.
Kill Skuls.

I have very found memories of Perez Park. Before Hollows was added it was THE place to level up around level 6-14 by either street sweeping Skulls and Hellions or the fun team Hydra hunting.

[Rust]

I remember Perez Park was the place that was suicide to go into alone - especially crazy to dare the interior by yourself.

I also remember spending a insanely long period of time in my lower 30s scouring the tunnels of the Hollows looking for the Trolls Archvillain leader.

Good times. Good times.

[doc7924]

I remember Perez Park was the place that was suicide to go into alone - especially crazy to dare the interior by yourself.

I also remember spending a insanely long period of time in my lower 30s scouring the tunnels of the Hollows looking for the Trolls Archvillain leader.

Good times. Good times.

When I unlocked my Peacebringer (and this was the long way - had to get your first 50, not 20 or just buying the damn thing in the market)- Once I hit lvl 6 and got Nova I went to Perez and hover low enough to blast the mobs on the street, but high enough that they couldn't shoot at me back. Killing large groups of lvl 7 and 8's got me to level 10 pretty quick.

[Sailboat]

The game was being made better, enhanced to be more fun, cutting out the crap that was old and not enjoyable to make the game a more fun experience.

This is one of the things I most resent about the "sunset."  The game was mature and well-developed, with lots of conveniences and lots experience balancing ATs and cleaning up bugs (although some certainly remained).  Issue 24 was going to do even more of that.  And then, boom.

People have suggested going to "newer" games.  Games that still have a lot of things to work out.  But new games often fail or fold before ever reaching the level of development (and the immense labor of love behind that development) that eight-year-old COH had.  I don't want to be floundering around again watching developers blunder through the process of finding out what does and does not work, system-wide nerfs/buffs, and so on -- I liked the "mostly completed" COH, with its many quality-of-life improvements, (mostly) well-thought-out AT balance, and huge trove of missions, activities, and minigames.

And what are the odds a new game will outlive teething troubles and get to be eight years old?  Not many games get to 8 and still make money.  (And, dammit, COH still made money!)

I'm trying The Secret World these days.  It's good, but it's no COH.  TSW is facing a large-scale rebalancing of items and abilities in the next patch/issue; it's not yet two years old, and already there are threads in its forums on "reviving this dead game," "I've come back after a long time, what's changed?" and "game is losing players/old/defunct/whatever."  I see those and think, "But you're just starting!"  If people consider a less-than-two-year-old game defunct, how will we ever GET one to eight?

Gah.

Half the fun with you first toon was trying to get across the Hollows or Steel Canyon without getting killed.

The Hollows in those days was fear, and effort, and sudden death; the Hollows was hard missions, far from help, hospitals, or resupply; the Hollows was running, running until you could almost feel the stitch in your side, almost hear your own labored breath catch as those purple-conning Trolls turned -- had they spotted you?  I hated it and loved it.  I was all-too-often dead, but I felt alive.

On that last night, at "sunset," I was alone, far across the Hollows, atop Eastgate Heights, my first 50 sitting in the lotus position, at the moment the world ended.

[Aggelakis]

I'm trying The Secret World these days.  It's good, but it's no COH.  TSW is facing a large-scale rebalancing of items and abilities in the next patch/issue; it's not yet two years old, and already there are threads in its forums on "reviving this dead game," "I've come back after a long time, what's changed?" and "game is losing players/old/defunct/whatever."  I see those and think, "But you're just starting!"  If people consider a less-than-two-year-old game defunct, how will we ever GET one to eight?

This made me laugh so hard. Neverwinter - which went live YESTERDAY - already has those posts on the forums. The day open beta went through, there were those posts on the forums. People are stupid, that's all.

[blacksly]

Go.
Hunt.
Kill Skuls.

Heh, is that a UniqueDragon reference?

[Aggelakis]

Heh, is that a UniqueDragon reference?

No, UniqueDragon's reference is noting the game well be gone to the Americans after rares dupin and jerk hackin. http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/UniqueDragon

Kill Skuls was another dude, who recruited people to do his Skulls hunt in Perez Park for him. http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Kill_Skuls

[Stone Daemon]

I also remember spending a insanely long period of time in my lower 30s scouring the tunnels of the Hollows looking for the Trolls Archvillain leader.

Good times. Good times.

Wait, wait--what? There was a troll AV down there?

I never saw one! 

[Rust]

Wait, wait--what? There was a troll AV down there?

I never saw one! 

That was the point. There wasn't one down there. But I remember the official website's dossier on the Trolls stated their leader was in the Tunnels of the Hollows...and I kept trying to find him as opposed to running the low 30s Contact Missions...which were either Paragon Protector Missions or Devouring Earth.

Coincidentally, those missions taught me to really hate the Devouring Earth. Also dang near stalled out my progress in the game and further encouraged my Altaholism to the point it took another six years just to get one toon to Level 50.

The game is stellar fun, don't get me wrong, but the Low 30s really saw things draaaaaaaag. It wasn't until the AE opened that I finally busted through that glass ceiling - giving me something to fight beyond Devouring Earth.

EDIT: That's one of the biggest failings of the game, I fell. There were a ton of villain groups and organizations out there, but you always ended up fighting a handful at a time. It wasn't until the 40s that it felt like there were plenty of groups to fight.

Oddly enough, I think the group my lone Level 50 loved to knock around was Malta. For a Batman-esque Vigilante, Malta was a perfect fit, adversary wise. And being Dark Melee, it became a game of who hit first - the Sapper or me.

[Cinnder]

I don't think that it got too user friendly... but it did get too much Meta-Gaming friendly, in my opinion. (and maybe that's splitting hairs and/or the same thing you meant)

Meaning, there were things added in that took away from the game being a world. I'm not sure what really started it (or if every game is always in a progression towards that and it just grows as it goes).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not down about how the game was. I just felt like a lot of things were taking away from the virtual reality and contributed to the community standard becoming more and more accustomed to faster missions, faster/more xp, less pause and wait in-between... less casual fun and more stream-lined efficiency for gain/profit.

Maybe it was IOs. Maybe it was the leveling curve. Maybe it was some of AE's influence. Maybe it was a number of things, all combining.
The playerbase (the general average, of course... not a true blanket statement as all the variables exist, no question). It just seemed to get more and more of a stream-lined racing and/or efficient-potency than a game where people would bump into each other on the street and have fun, funny and/or entertaining interactions.

/end ramble 

I'm with EK here.  While I understand that some players wanted quicker access to the action, I felt it was the "world" part of the game that suffered.  Sometimes in my most curmudgeonly moods I'd say the game was heading towards becoming just a menu of missions you'd get right after the login screen.  Since characters spent less time in the world between missions, it made the game feel emptier.  In the old days, I'd bump into folks on the street and chat or join up.  Towards the end it was more the global channels where this would happen, which made the world itself seem less realistic. 

[LaughingAlex]

If it hasn't already been mentioned but http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DemonicSpiders quotes alot of City of heroes in there.  Thing is, I find when I play CO, it's to easy cause, well, theres nothing that requires any kind of effective counters.  CO has no malta organization equivilent and theres nothing in the game that has any kind of real deadly killer for freeforms.  The games to easy.  CoX however, it still punished those who were not doing anything to counter some mobs.  You couldn't just ignore the sappers on most characters and not having breakfrees or some anti-mezz like clarion was asking for certain disaster against both the Malta operative and the Knives of Artemis.  In CO however you can pretty much ignore everything, the game is the exact opposite....I feel it holds your hand even at level FORTY even, ugh.

If your wondering, I'd solo many Malta missions on 8x on quite a few chars.  Not +4 as it just made the mobs living tanks to me....and I remember the dark armor sucks video someone posted, where a guy took on 8x malta at +4 mode pre-incarnate.

[Tenzhi]

I always thought that instead of adding the Tailor feature to Trainers they should have allowed you to click on phone booths to access it.

Mind you, I hate the notion of Trainers more than the notion of Superspeedsters riding trains.

[Megajoule]

Let's be honest:  a lot of vanilla CoH followed the MMO design assumptions of the time, one of which was that padding out playtime with travel was the same as actual content.  (If it keeps them logged in and subscribed, what's the difference?)  Thus, all of those quests missions that send you from one side of Kalimdor the city to the other and back again...  As I've said elsewhere, it's a wonder to me sometimes that the game lasted long enough to become as awesome as it eventually did.  (Lack of competition in that subgenre surely helped, as did the passionate committment that uniqueness fostered in many players.)

A group I was very proud to be a part of, the Taxibots, was founded in large part to do away with some of those artificial barriers and inconveniences - a de facto joining of the Yellow and Green Lines in Steel, for example, and easy access to the iCon in that zone when it was a lowbie's only real option for changing their costume.  (Also, badge tours and rescuing hapless heroes from the deadly obstacle course that was the original Hollows.)  As time went on, many of these things were changed in such a way as to make the Taxibots less necessary; however, I don't resent being made "obsolete."  We performed a valuable and helpful service when it was needed, and if the game itself was later patched to do some of the same things, that shows that we had the right idea(s).  We were just ahead of the curve.

True, some of the changes were a little much and/or damaging to "sense of world"; I believe I raised that concern when the TUNNEL links went in.  But I must admit I used them, and my vet reward Wentworth's-from-anywhere, and the mission teleporter, and all those other little conveniences that, after eight years of pushing against CoH's original design 'features' - sometimes uphill - I came to appreciate.  I no longer had to worry about crossing five zones (with a train transfer in the middle) to get to the mission door, or stop the team's momentum cold to rush off to the auction house and empty my inventory, or juggle mentors and sidekicks and try to remember who was allowed in what hazard zones.  I could just play with my friends - something CoH always did better than the others, and only improved at.

[saipaman]

Powers that you could only get as veteran's rewards didn't hurt the game.  For example, those bonus teleport powers greatly improved your chances of getting a Shadow Shard Task Force.

On the other hand, I was enraged by the idea that "20 was the new "50" Kheldians.

[Turjan]

When my missus first started playing CoH she was always surprised to arrive at a mission door and find me already there.

"How do you always get to the gigs so fast?" she'd say.
And I'd reply, "It's like 'The Knowledge' that London cabbies have - I've flown round this city so many times now I know all the short cuts by heart."

That's something that had faded in CoH by Issue 23. At that point it seemed you were never more than 2 jumps at most from where you needed to get to. Gone were the days of "Well, the Yellow line doesn't go there, so I'll have to take the road to here, then hop the green line, then access the hazard door from that zone..."

Which was good...I suppose. But it did sometimes feel too easy sometimes, stepping into that portal next to Atlas tram station. Having 'The Knowledge' was more fun

And then there's The Hollows of course.
Back before its makeover, with no shops, or hospital, and no travel powers til 14...that was most players' first exposure to real challenges in the game. It's also where I learned the fine - and forever useful - art of judging aggro zones. I zoomed out the view with the mouse wheel, and could see in my mind's eye the circles around the gangs, and knew that to cross them was a Bad Thing.

And no travel or hospital or trainers meant that the easiest way to get out of the Hollows and back to Ms Liberty was to "Take the waaahmbulance" by just running into one of those huge gangs of mobs and waking up in Atlas A&E

All in all, I'd not say the game got too user friendly exactly - I think it was more like comparing a supermarket to high street shops: everything in a supermarket is conveniently to hand, but somehow it's missing the intimacy and personal touch of those small high street business.

[doc7924]

To add to my post - its like what happened with Saints Row 3.

In Saints Row 2 you had to actually drive (or fly) around the city to get to mission points. In your cribs you had rooms and maybe one room had clothes and your safe and another had your weapons. And each crib had a unique design.

For Saints Row 3 they made your cell phone your mission point so all you had to do to get a new mission was press a button no matter where you were. And for the cribs they were more or less were the same if it was the same type of building and instead of rooms where you had to go for various things they made a simple menu that you press with one button to get whatever you want.

Now the system in SR3 made the game go faster since you could get missions and access your crib stash quicker, but most players of SR2 missed the immersion of having to navigate the city to points to start missions.

In a way this is what COH did and I am not complaining or say I hated it, I just felt it took away the immersion of this big city when you could basically get to any zone from almost anywhere. Or have tailors everywhere for the sake of a quick makeover.

Plus the devs obviously put a lot of time and talent into the city design of the streets, buildings, traffic, those great billboards, etc and its a shame that many new players towards the end may have not gotten to appreciate the city like us old time vets did.

[srmalloy]

And then there's The Hollows of course.
Back before its makeover, with no shops, or hospital, and no travel powers til 14...that was most players' first exposure to real challenges in the game. It's also where I learned the fine - and forever useful - art of judging aggro zones. I zoomed out the view with the mouse wheel, and could see in my mind's eye the circles around the gangs, and knew that to cross them was a Bad Thing.

...the skill that I referred to as 'BlasterStealth' -- a nuanced familiarity with the aggro radius of mobs to be able to skate around spawns without drawing attention to yourself, and even getting Stealth didn't change what you did; it just gave you the ability to (mostly) get away with it inside the confines of a mission map.

[ag88t88]

Yeah, from the start I felt like making the trainers do costumes was just completely redundant.  It made no sense for one (I'm Miss Liberty and I'll train you, or change your clothes for you)  And two, once they put an Icon in AP, it was like, why bother with the trainers? You got a shop right there.

Honestly I didn't mind some of the stream-lined, more user friendly bits especially since they were doing it with the re-launch of freedom, but the trainer\costume maker thing was silly IMO. 

I liked the merging of the two train lines, especially in the larger zones.  To be honest, I like the option in newer MMORPGs of
having clickable teleport icons on zone maps.  The train depots always felt awkward to me and un-superhero like.

I didnt agree with having tailor options available from trainers,  it kind of made having the tailor shops pointless.

[dwturducken]

So, evidently, this is a topic being discussed all over the Internetisphere.

http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/7540/Mark-Kern-Have-MMOs-Become-Too-Easy.html