Why CoH over other Superhero MMOs?

[Triplash]

I like being able to jump!  Just a regular jump.  Over a rock... Onto a chair...  It felt good to jump in CoX.

Why can't I jump in a lot of games?

I know right?

"Behold! It is I, the mighty godslayer, feared in all the lands! I have toppled kings and burned cities to dust! Yet even I am powerless to prevent defeat at the hands of my archnemesis... a 1-foot shrub."

[Blondeshell]

Why CoH over other <insert genre> MMOs?

For all of these reasons:

http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,5754

[Xieveral]

I could be a villain.

[General Idiot]

For me, it was partly the overwhelming amount of customisation, partly the social mechanics (Super sidekicking and eight man teams are things every game should have) and partly the way they balanced the game - everything was overpowered. Everything. Which really helped get the feel of playing a superhero instead of playing random adventurer #643879.

[srmalloy]

1.  A feeling that your character became more powerful relative to even level mobs as you gained in level.  I have not experienced that in any other
MMORPG, and I've played quite a few.

To be fair, it wasn't really until NCSoft bought out Cryptic and formed NC NorCal/Paragon Studios that the game started changing for this; Jack Emmert's 'vision' that ruled the early issues of the game was based heavily around the "3 minions = 1 hero" concept, and his idea that "fun" meant going up against the end boss again and again and again, getting defeated each time, until you found the one tactic that would work against them. That was one of the changes that was made after Paragon Studios took over development on the game.

[Kaiser Tarantula]

What made me love CoH more than other games?

Sidekicking that actually worked.  You could play with friends regardless of their level and do something productive with them.  The scaling system was great - you retained a few advantages from being a higher level character when exemping, and a sidekicked lowbie wasn't so gimped that they were completely useless unless the original level difference between them is ridiculous (like sidekicking a level 5 character up to the level cap).  Not even Champions Online, the closest game to CoH in both execution and aesthetics, pulls this off.  Exemping down makes you gimpy compared to an appropriately-levelled character, while sidekicking up leaves you without the tools you need to be effective in a party since powers are so few and far between.

Death Mechanics that were severe enough to want to avoid them, but weren't gimp-inducing or frustrating.  Experience debt cuts your experience earned, but working it off was rewarding because there's badges for doing so.  You could even pre-emptively clear debt by building up a stock of Patrol Experience as a buffer.  Sometimes, it was even advantageous to level slower - mostly to avoid missing content due to levelling too fast.  On that note...

Content that I wanted to see to completion.  No game has ever engaged me in the lore of its world like CoH has.  The characters have personality, the missions themselves were fun, fetchquests and kill-quests weren't the order-of-the-day, and there were ongoing story arcs everywhere.  Almost every contact had a story arc.  To date, CoH is the only game where I've avoided levelling in order to see all the game has to offer.

I felt Powerful.  In CoH, common grunt soldiers and the like eventually give way to super-powered elite enemies, minor monsters, the living dead, and more exotic things.  You aren't fighting gangs and soldiers from first level to last.  There wa a progression - even within the same enemy group, the more exotic and dangerous forms of enemy wouldn't appear at lower levels.  For instance, the Circle of Thorns.  At low levels, you see knife-wielding cultists and occasionally minor magi.  At high-levels, you face a non-stop flood of powerful mages, fiery behemoth-demons, and demonic ghosts.  Even the lowly Hellions - their lowest ranks are ordinary thugs, while the higher ranks feature actual demons and gangers endowed with hellfire.

There was no need for Gear.  Enhancements drop from everything, and even-levelled enhancements can be combined up to higher values.  You didn't have to farm rare bosses for gear.  You didn't have to kill specific enemies for drops.  You could make a perfectly playable and acceptable character fighting nothing but minions and lieutenants from first level to last.  Yet, if you wanted to trick out your character for extra advantages and neat little perks, you had the option of doing so via the invention system.

Everyone got their own Loot.  No squabbling over who-gets-what drop.  You do the work, you choose your reward, you walk away happy.  No MMO I've ever played has ever been so generous.

[JaguarX]

Everyone got their own Loot.  No squabbling over who-gets-what drop.  You do the work, you choose your reward, you walk away happy.  No MMO I've ever played has ever been so generous.

Yeah this is another system among many that I liked overall. Nothing worse than having to get into a near pvp match over a piece of gear.

Although it was slightly annoying to continiously do the same work and missions as the next team mate but they get the good stuff while I'm stuck with Pacing the Turtle as the highlight of my day. I do think it should have been more standardize instead of Casino game based, but overall one of the best drop systems I ever came across that is for sure.

[LadyShin]

Simply because...Other MMOs have all the ingredients..But never in the right quantities.

Making a MMO is like making a gourmet 4-course meal: Everything must be the right quality, in the right order, in the right quantities, presented at the right time, for it to be a masterpiece...City of Heroes was that. If City of Heroes was a main dish, Gordon Ramsay would have been proud to feature it on his cooking show.

[LadyShin]

What made me love CoH more than other games?

Everyone got their own Loot.  No squabbling over who-gets-what drop.  You do the work, you choose your reward, you walk away happy.  No MMO I've ever played has ever been so generous.

This....so very this. I remember being ecstatic when I finally got that last bunch of Incarnate Threads that I needed to finish off that next tier of incarnate power...Then you got that sobering effect of being back at the bottom of the mountain looking up at the top when you opened up your incarnate power trees and saw exactly what you needed to do to continue to progress...exponential growth.

[GamingGlen]

Hmm. a list of likes.  I'll start with the OP's.

CoH was the primary MMO I played until it was closed down.  I started playing in beta and continued all through its life cycle.  I tried other games like CO and DCUO but they just didn't spark as well with me.  Why did I find CoH superior?  Let me count the ways:

I started about i6 time.

1. CoH had more powers than any other superhero MMO.

Dunno. Haven't played CO in free-to-play mode enough to find out.

2. Villains.  You could play an actual villain in CoH.  Where else can you actually do that?  Not only could you play a villain but you could reform to a hero or have a hero go bad.

Except for a couple arcs and mayhems, the villainy felt hollow; it was more like you were a bully for the establishment than a real villain.  You didn't have any personal goals, except to toady up to Arachnos.  I wanted to acquire wealth (virtual represented by briefcases full of cash, art works, supercars, precious gems) as one goal of a villain; they could have used the under-used souvenir system for that.

4. Incarnate trials.  I played them so much with my level 50 characters.  They were like raids in Everquest (which was my main game before CoH) only not so long and tedious.

I hate raids, no matter the game.

5. Enhancements.  I miss all those special enhancements you could get to give your character additional abilities like defense, recharge time reduction or health and endurance increases.  They really helped you make your high level characters feel more powerful.

I like the IO system, but it didn't do all that was promised.  For example, I was looking forward to having a hold on my blaster based on a hold IO, and the procs weren't what I was looking for.
Perhaps having procs that added together in one power, say 1 = 20% (or whatever percentage it was), and slotting additional ones increased the percentage, say: 2x = 50%, 3x = 80%. This might have made those minor damage attacks worth slotting for them, effectively changing the power from an attack power to an attack & hold power.

6. The music.  I miss zipping around Paragon city with my own personal sound track.  It resonated with me more than any other game currently available.

I quickly turned off the repetitive noise.

7. New content.  Since Freedom there was so much more content released.  I didn't even mind paying for the costumes and powers I didn't get as a subscriber.

It didn't seem that that much more was added than before. And, they REMOVED content: the starting arcs and their original maps for the last mission.  Yeah, not the most excting arcs, but I rather do them again then repeat that new first one again and again and again.  Instead, I started street sweeping the first 3-4 levels with every new character, then maybe join DFB (or vice-versa).

9.  The community.  Never before and never since have I played a game that had so many great people in it always willing to help each other out.  I still play MMO's but there are just so many games where the jerks outnumber the good folks.

Ah yes, the touted community.  It really wasn't all that.  It is probably better than other games, but COH's community had its share of jerks, elite cliques, and SGs ruled by control freaks.


Now, for a few of my own.

As a ranged attacker, I never liked having two powers that did the same thing, except for difference in damage level.  I have no problem spamming the main attack power.  The other one was a waste of a power slot.  If it did something different, say the range was longer for the less damaging attack, or took a LOT less END, than it would be fine.  Or, as I mentioned with IOs, it could be made to BE different.

As for CO, I hate the Endurance building game mechanic.  Is this some standard way of doing things in other MMOs?

(sigh.. age.. after writing the above I forgot what else I was going to say.. guess will add later. .. there's no "old" emoticon?  about time one was made? old man face:  )

[PunkusJR]

the lack of regular content updates and lockboxes.  Lockboxes are the devil! 

I started playing Champions about when these were introduced. And then they announce the vehicles and I got excited, and reasonably so. But when those came out it was buy them, or open lock boxes for them, and if you wanted to have a good vehicle you had to go for the lock box or buy it from another player. I've heard there are some new comic missions you can do for free, so I might pull a friend in to play though those, but things like lock boxes are what severely kill most MMOs for me including champions.

I hate pay to win stuff. It was kind of there in city (Where you could buy IOs) but not to the extent other MMOs have. I can't remember what it was called, but I remember a ftp one where the buyable gear was literally just higher level equipment with lower level requirements. I hate this sort of thing with a passion. Buyable stuff shouldn't be a way to gain power. When City went free to play it was done right. The new powersets weren't completely OP, they were just different and new.

[GamingGlen]

I don't have much issue with lockboxes; it's what helps make the game free to play.  I played STO, both my Federation and Klingon characters made it to maximum level without them.  Yeah, I cannot get the new shinies, but then I'm not interested in playing any Ferengi or Cardassion characters or fly their ships.  In CO, I haven't felt any need for them, either, although I've only gotten to level 21 so far (and deleted that character, now level 19 is max at the moment).

[GamingGlen]

Ragdoll physics. 

I miss them so much now while playing CO as the mobs in CO just fall over in the same way each time (or the robots explode into dust).

[OzonePrime]

The costume creator! Missions you could finish in 15mins. Powers not locked to archtype. Not having to run all over creation and still accomplishing nothing and you just spent hours doing that. Not pvp centric. City of Heroes is the best game ever!

[doc7924]

Agree with all except the villain part.

Even playing COV I hardly felt like a villain. The early stages maybe, but besides bank jobs you mostly always fought other villain groups.

And a lot of times the same groups you fight as a hero.

[srmalloy]

Even playing COV I hardly felt like a villain. The early stages maybe, but besides bank jobs you mostly always fought other villain groups.

Only the newspaper missions gave you any semblance of working for yourself; all the contact missions leave you feeling like a contract legbreaker for someone else.

It would have been more difficult to completely rework the contact aspect of the game so that as you defeated mobs, you would occasionally get a random clue, which you would be able to investigate. As a noob villain, your options for investigation would be limited -- newspaper, library, Internet -- and the different types of research could either result in a mission lead or a contact. A mission lead would result in another clue to be investigated; a contact would give you a mission and become an additional resource you could use for investigation -- for a clue in a mission arc associated with that contact, they would be able to take a clue that you'd gotten from a previous mission and 'figure out' where the clue led (feeding you the next mission in the arc); for a clue from another contact's arc, they would point you to whichever of your existing contacts the mission arc belonged to, or possibly suggest a new contact (i.e, a contact who had information on the Circle of Thorns in the 6-10 range might admit that he doesn't have deep enough information on them to help you, but that this other guy he knows has done more investigation, and feed you to him for the 11-16 range, and so on).

This preserves most of the 'interacting with your contacts to get missions', but turns the way it's described in game terms around, so that it's the character that finds the original clues to story arcs and then develops the story arc themselves by investigating the clues, working through the contacts they acquire as a resource that the character has, not with the character being a resource the contact uses to do things for them. And there could also be various kinds of one-shot contacts, where the character could be directed to another NPC, or (harder to do) be approached by the NPC for a conversation where they've got a lead on something that they think the character might be interested in, but they've got this problem that they need help with; this would give a mission to take care of the contact's problem, after which the contact would give out a second mission that gives bigger rewards -- a temporary power, an item of rare salvage, an otherwise-useless item that can be fenced for a sizeable amount, or the like. Once the character completes the initial 'favor' mission and gets the mission lead, the NPC disappears, their problem having been addressed.

[Nealix]

Villain side might have been perfect but it was the best that had been done up to then (an perhaps since).  Besides this is a thread about what you liked about CoH, not what you didn't like that someone else did.  Lets look at that glass as half full!

[GamingGlen]

How about we look at the whole glass, and not just the happy carefree nothing-is-wrong part? 

Time for a little rant:

I'm so sick of the avoid-negativity aspect today. Facebook does it a lot.  Want to remove a friend?  It's three options deep in small print at the bottom of the screen/window.  But they sure give you several ways to add them with large buttons and windows.  Same way goes for apps: easy to add, a little more difficult to remove.

And the CORP channel on CO: you can't say anything negative at all, no matter how slight or if meant to be in jest (even with emoticons and context that shows it was meant to be a tease).

Okay, I feel better now.  Thanks for listening (if you did).

[Nealix]

Someone needs some milk and cookies! lol

[GamingGlen]

Someone needs some milk and cookies! lol

Yes, yes I do.   

Sorry about the rant.