New efforts!

[Vee]

Did anyone have a fav toon that could solo that recluse TF (Statesman TF yes?)? If so, share how it went and how long the TF took you.

Wait, have you heard of people doing that? I thought the OP was referring to soloing recluse in the patron arc. I can't imagine a build soloing stf or lrsf. I'd think the likely candidate would be ill/cold, rad or time with perma PA, but I don't think you could do enough damage to kill the towers in stf (assuming gw's heal doesn't work on PA) or get your pets focused enough to kill numina before she buffed the crap out of everyone in lrsf. maybe with inc pets, shivans, etc. i'd be interested to hear if people have done it too, and sounds like a worthy goal for once we have our pimped out toons done. Always wanted to try duoing lambda too but could never get a good time lined up with my friend and enough fillers.

[JanessaVR]

It was very much pay2win with end-game character builds (incarnate abilities and IO set bonuses) locked to subscribed users only.

Well, there actually has to be a reason to subscribe, or the game doesn't make money and the company making it goes out of business.  Everything can't be free - the business has to make money somehow.

[darkgob]

Wait, have you heard of people doing that? I thought the OP was referring to soloing recluse in the patron arc. I can't imagine a build soloing stf or lrsf. I'd think the likely candidate would be ill/cold, rad or time with perma PA, but I don't think you could do enough damage to kill the towers in stf (assuming gw's heal doesn't work on PA) or get your pets focused enough to kill numina before she buffed the crap out of everyone in lrsf. maybe with inc pets, shivans, etc. i'd be interested to hear if people have done it too, and sounds like a worthy goal for once we have our pimped out toons done. Always wanted to try duoing lambda too but could never get a good time lined up with my friend and enough fillers.

I know LRSF has been soloed, although I think Mind Doms are pretty much the only characters that can do it.

[Ohioknight]

Screw that. I likes my monies, and I really wanna level my toons back up. Been jonesing for  bank heist! Who's with me?!? You break out the villain in the Police Station jail cell and the rest of you, FOLLOW ME to VICTORY!

God, I loved that KR bank heist.  Home sick with some virus and I SO want to solo a level eight through the whole bank map right now!

[Ohioknight]

Yes you can always raise the argument of "well they gave you access to your character without having to pay for it, be grateful!" but no, it wasn't my character. It wasn't the beloved creation I spent months building.

Your Mileage May Vary -- to me, Clark Kent without heat vision and super breath, with only half his strength, is still Superman.  Peter Parker without Spider Sense is still Spider-Man.

[JanessaVR]

Wait, have you heard of people doing that? I thought the OP was referring to soloing recluse in the patron arc. I can't imagine a build soloing stf or lrsf. I'd think the likely candidate would be ill/cold, rad or time with perma PA, but I don't think you could do enough damage to kill the towers in stf (assuming gw's heal doesn't work on PA) or get your pets focused enough to kill numina before she buffed the crap out of everyone in lrsf. maybe with inc pets, shivans, etc. i'd be interested to hear if people have done it too, and sounds like a worthy goal for once we have our pimped out toons done. Always wanted to try duoing lambda too but could never get a good time lined up with my friend and enough fillers.

As of the shutdown, my primary character was an Illusion/Time Controller.  And yes, I was awesome with Holds and Slows - I could lock down whole groups of enemies like nobody's business and I had achieved Perma-Hasten with close to Perma-PA (a few seconds gap).  But this was not a damage-dealing build - I could hold most things very well, but dealing with AV's was a whole other story.

[Wyrm]

I'm not wealthy by any means but with the game being my primary hobby its $15/month subscription fee (actually, had two paid accounts and multiple free accounts) was a triviality for the amount of entertainment I received.

A billion times, this.  I'm now at almost 27 months of trying and failing to find a game that engages and entertains me the way CoH did.  I've thrown money down rabbit holes with pretty pictures (Tera), ridiculous abilities to have any class at max level once you get one character there (Rift), a total inability to decide whether the devs want me to team or solo (Secret World), Jedi that manage to be boring (guess), pretty pictures with catgirls (FFXIV), an actual NCSoft product (yes, I finally went and bought GW2, because I appreciate NCSoft being willing to come to the table at all) - and have played, but not thrown money at, a disappointing supers game (CO) and probably 1-2 more that I'm repressing.  I actually got so turned off by recent idiocy in FFXIV (if I'm running something for the first time and I know the mechanics better than the vet healer, and get yelled at for playing my warrior-tank correctly based on the encounter mechanics by someone who then goes and chicken$$$$ logs off before I can even respond, I get annoyed) that I considered quitting online gaming altogether.

The only thing that keeps me interested in gaming is the possibility that CoH will come back.  No lie.  My wife is loving FFXIV, but I actually find it stressful to play in such a rigid "trinity" kind of environment, and would uninstall every other MMO in a heartbeat if I got access to CoH servers again.  I had that much fun.

I'm happy to pay what I did, or more, for the I23 version of the game.  I will have my two accounts, and my wife's account (she'll come back), and I will play the hell out of it.  Every character from scratch.  (Well, every fun character.  Kin/Sonic.  SS/EA.  Rad/Sonic.  Ill/Rad.  Fire/Fire [tank].  Time/Fire.  Some number of doms.  Some kind of stone tank, but probably not /EM again, because even black-purple, the pom-poms were silly-looking.)  Don't care about having to start over.

The best part is, the folks who don't want to or can't pay as much?  They get almost all of the same content, if the business model doesn't dramatically change.  I'm happy to pay a little more to help fund the game, if it means the folks who want to pay less can come back as well.

Blargh.  I just can't be succinct. I miss the hell out of this game.

[ivanhedgehog]

Yeah it's no biggy to me since tor basically prints money if you actually play quite a bit. But the prices of rare mats and items crafted with them dropping to less than half their market value in the course of a few days is kind of a big deal, especially since that was one of the few ways casual players could make decent amounts of money that didn't involve dropping money on the cartel market. Funny though that they rushed to fix this that they specifically said wasn't an exploit while they let the ravagers exploit which really was only available to a small percentage of high end raiders go on for a month. Of course they were on holiday most of that time so i suppose that's the difference. Supposedly there are going to be other slots with other goodies soon. Hopefully they'll think through the drop rate beforehand with those.

the ravagers exploit was open to anyone with a level 60. on my server we had 40+ instances of people cyling through it at 1 time.  The devs overnered to an extreme. you have a 10k times more chance to win the rl lottery than to win the mount now. swtor is going to be shedding subs quickly now, it took their devs 7 weeks to determine that the 16 man version of ravagers sm was dropping 8 man loot. raiders are starting to leave. good time to pull them to COX.

[FloatingFatMan]

Would rather have them offer for a limited time "instant level 50", buy the item and click it and your character instantly levels to 50.

For those that have many characters to recreate and don't want to grind/farm/play them all to 50 ;) 8)

A level 50 with no INF to gear up will be hella gimped, and have no unlocked contacts to grab missions from!

[AmberOfDzu]

A level 50 with no INF to gear up will be hella gimped, and have no unlocked contacts to grab missions from!

It would have to include a police scanner and o-portal power along with the XP to fifty.

Still seems wrong to me. Half the fun is leveling up. There were lots of paths for variety to do so and plenty of ways to speed it up if one was in a hurry.

[Vee]

Ugh, haven't tried the slots since the patch today but that sounds like an overnerf, then again i'm not sure there's such a thing in the mmo world as a just right nerf. may run a couple stacks today just to see if it's worth it should i ever run out of jawa junk.

I forgot all about mind doms and the confuse fun. Couldn't remember if /time had any or enough -resist for gms etc. I could solo gms on my ill/cold and i know ill/rads could as well. I'd be willing to believe ill/kin could do it too. I think my mids-fu is gone. My ill/cold was perma PA with 35 ranged def when the game was live. i'm like 12 seconds off on my recent attempt.

[LaughingAlex]

A level 50 with no INF to gear up will be hella gimped, and have no unlocked contacts to grab missions from!

You could always set the difficulty to -1 and only fight council on normal difficulty to start slotting.  It'd certainly be shameful though.  Radio missions or newspaper would be vital.  You'd also have to run away after the first fight with that limited inf supply to grab a bunch of inspirations to make up for that "Miss miss miss" to-hit/accuracy ratting, blues, and maybe greens due to just being such a weak character.

Course if the build was horrible from being an AE baby or a classic n00b(not learning anything and thinking your role/function is to be over-specialized to a point of uselessness solo) then yeah, you'd be screwed.  Weak as hell and useless solo = useless to teams, especially if your short sighted enough to never ever get enhancements and they notice it.

[Noyjitat]

It was very much pay2win with end-game character builds (incarnate abilities and IO set bonuses) locked to subscribed users only.

You have no idea what pay2win means. Do you honestly think you're entitled a complete game for free? What's the point of a subscription when you just get everything for free or a one time fee? With business models like that you would have to constantly be selling copies of the game or hundreds of thousands of micro transactions.

Without subscribers the game would of died for real and not just because it was making less money than other ncsoft games. Infact the game would of died way before the ncsoft purchase of the game and it's dev team long before incarnate or setbonuses were even added.

[Arcana]

You have no idea what pay2win means. Do you honestly think you're entitled a complete game for free? What's the point of a subscription when you just get everything for free or a one time fee? With business models like that you would have to constantly be selling copies of the game or hundreds of thousands of micro transactions.

Without subscribers the game would of died for real and not just because it was making less money than other ncsoft games. Infact the game would of died way before the ncsoft purchase of the game and it's dev team long before incarnate or setbonuses were even added.

A lot of people jump on the "pay2win" label thinking its synonymous with "make you pay for the stuff you want" which is more properly described as a "paywall."  All subscription games with F2P options had paywalls by definition: something had to cost something.  But not everyone fully understands how loaded the term "pay2win" is, when its really intended to convey a very specific idea that the game development is driven by a principle of using a limited amount of content to hook players into paying for the real game, which requires substantial amounts of money to meaningfully play.

While there were some debatable aspects of CoH that had some p2w aspects, I don't think you could legitimately claim CoH was pay to win, because there was little you could do by paying you couldn't do by just playing.  There were purchases that made things easier, and its a grey area when easier becomes pay2win, but overall I think the fact that close to 90% of the game content outside of cosmetics was accessible to free players makes it untenable to claim CoH was a pay2win game, Incarnate content notwithstanding.

Put it this way: during City of Heroes Freedom, if someone asked me if it was worth trying out CoH for free, because they didn't have much money and wanted to play something fun, I would have recommended CoH without reservations.  I would have said it was probably the best MMO you could play while paying absolutely nothing, and while you would bump into things that you couldn't do because you were free, you could level to the cap, play multiple alts, play all of the core content, and build very powerful heroes without paying a dime.  And most importantly, as long as you were a decent player, you could team reasonably well without anyone on the team knowing you didn't spend a dime to make your character.  That is practically the antithesis of a canonical pay2win game.

[Sinistar]

A lot of people jump on the "pay2win" label thinking its synonymous with "make you pay for the stuff you want" which is more properly described as a "paywall."  All subscription games with F2P options had paywalls by definition: something had to cost something.  But not everyone fully understands how loaded the term "pay2win" is, when its really intended to convey a very specific idea that the game development is driven by a principle of using a limited amount of content to hook players into paying for the real game, which requires substantial amounts of money to meaningfully play.

While there were some debatable aspects of CoH that had some p2w aspects, I don't think you could legitimately claim CoH was pay to win, because there was little you could do by paying you couldn't do by just playing.  There were purchases that made things easier, and its a grey area when easier becomes pay2win, but overall I think the fact that close to 90% of the game content outside of cosmetics was accessible to free players makes it untenable to claim CoH was a pay2win game, Incarnate content notwithstanding.

Put it this way: during City of Heroes Freedom, if someone asked me if it was worth trying out CoH for free, because they didn't have much money and wanted to play something fun, I would have recommended CoH without reservations.  I would have said it was probably the best MMO you could play while paying absolutely nothing, and while you would bump into things that you couldn't do because you were free, you could level to the cap, play multiple alts, play all of the core content, and build very powerful heroes without paying a dime.  And most importantly, as long as you were a decent player, you could team reasonably well without anyone on the team knowing you didn't spend a dime to make your character.  That is practically the antithesis of a canonical pay2win game.

i agree that for free CoH was well worth playing. You could still hit 50 as I recall, no IO's, no incarnate powers and a cap on how many characters you could have and how much INF each one could have (way below 2 billion as I recall)

What some players also may have forgotten is that back in issue 1 to 8 you could still make tough characters with only SO's.  Maybe not quite at the beloved defense caps that we enjoyed, but still tough characters.  Yes you could purchase an invention license but I think that was for 30days.

The real power as it were went to those that subscribed. IO's, incarnate powers: stronger characters.

But free players could still run all the content except for incarnate arcs and trials and could still have powerful characters.

[LaughingAlex]

A lot of people jump on the "pay2win" label thinking its synonymous with "make you pay for the stuff you want" which is more properly described as a "paywall."  All subscription games with F2P options had paywalls by definition: something had to cost something.  But not everyone fully understands how loaded the term "pay2win" is, when its really intended to convey a very specific idea that the game development is driven by a principle of using a limited amount of content to hook players into paying for the real game, which requires substantial amounts of money to meaningfully play.

While there were some debatable aspects of CoH that had some p2w aspects, I don't think you could legitimately claim CoH was pay to win, because there was little you could do by paying you couldn't do by just playing.  There were purchases that made things easier, and its a grey area when easier becomes pay2win, but overall I think the fact that close to 90% of the game content outside of cosmetics was accessible to free players makes it untenable to claim CoH was a pay2win game, Incarnate content notwithstanding.

Put it this way: during City of Heroes Freedom, if someone asked me if it was worth trying out CoH for free, because they didn't have much money and wanted to play something fun, I would have recommended CoH without reservations.  I would have said it was probably the best MMO you could play while paying absolutely nothing, and while you would bump into things that you couldn't do because you were free, you could level to the cap, play multiple alts, play all of the core content, and build very powerful heroes without paying a dime.  And most importantly, as long as you were a decent player, you could team reasonably well without anyone on the team knowing you didn't spend a dime to make your character.  That is practically the antithesis of a canonical pay2win game.

I think the fact that incarnate powers were not necessary for non-incarnate content and the fact that even IOs were not necessary to make an effective character generally means city of heroes was not a pay to win game.  Pay to win generally screams "You won't have any success without paying", or you'll find that game multitudes harder to win often for the wrong reasons.  CO comes to mind with this.  It's wholly 'pay to win'.  If your pvping, archtypes are save the savage utterly unable to compete with freeforms, and even the savage cannot compete with pvp-specific freeforms.  A freeform can kill a soldier or inferno in about 4-5 seconds while taking ZERO damage in that time frame, thanks to active defenses and generally having solid firepower. 

But in PVE likewise, well, the hard parts end up a slogs(And the bad kind of slogs) while freefroms curbstomp them with tons of defenses making it easy.  Archtypes get killed all the time things in general that are supposed to be easy, and often die easy when they overagro even slightly.  Freeforms have to very, very far over-agro enemies to come even close to dying.  I saw a guy die a few days to simple over-agro.  Then there are spots that have extremely high enemy density, making over-agro a near to absolute certainty, and have objectives placed specifically to ensure you'll have overagro.  On top of that health-regen out of combat is very finicky, and you may not get any health orbs.  So CO is a pay to win game.

Another example was, well, a good number of shooters that are "play for free" also sometimes have "heres a pay-exclusive weapon or two, or even a ton and armor that are not available to free players that let you curb stomp them".  Thats a mean example but go figure, it's not fun in that case.

[MGLZadok]

Well, there actually has to be a reason to subscribe, or the game doesn't make money and the company making it goes out of business.  Everything can't be free - the business has to make money somehow.

Subscription-based games are really being passed on these days.  That's why The Old Republic and even World of Warcraft at least offer some "free-to-play" function.  Granted, they use it in more of "let's get 'em hooked!" mentality, but it's difficult to get people to commit to a time sink that actually requires them to participate instead of just sitting back and watching like Netflix.  I think it would be hard to get new subscribers for anything, especially a game risen from the dead.

I think the better option would be the business model that MOBAs use.  Everything is free to play.  Everything.  If it affect gameplay, you can get it with enough time put into the game.  But if you want it faster, well, you can spend your hard-earned money to pick and choose what you want.  So basically, there would be at least two currencies: points purchased with real-world money (Paragon Points) and points earned by playing the game, i.e. completing quests, earning achievements, etc. (we'll call them Support Points for the support of the people).  Support Points would be spent on all things that affect gameplay: . 

• Unlocking powersets
• Unlocking quest lines
• purchasing enhancements (exclusive to Support Points so people don't pay to win)

Paragon Points are used for purely cosmetic or non-combat things that aren't available for Support Points:

• costume pieces/sets
• convenience powers (mobile trainer, a power that teleports a friend to you from another zone if they accept, etc.)
• account or character changes (character renames, global account name change, etc.)
• emotes

League of Legends basically uses that model and they make money hand-over-fist.  All you have to do is pump out cosmetic content to keep the money flowing in.  Path of Exile is free-to-play with a store just for real-world money with only cosmetic stuff in it and they seem to be doing alright (nothing noteworthy, but they have a terrible dollar-to-currency ratio.

[Harpospoke]

Still seems wrong to me. Half the fun is leveling up. There were lots of paths for variety to do so and plenty of ways to speed it up if one was in a hurry.

Leveling up is about 1% of the fun to me.   ;)   I enjoyed the lvl 50 game the most.

[MM3squints]

Leveling up is about 1% of the fun to me.   ;)   I enjoyed the lvl 50 game the most.

[ivanhedgehog]

I just want to play!!!!negotiations advance on command!!!