Therumancer

I think there were a lot of problems from the beginning. To begin with I think the devs really wanted to create a "Marvel" game as they originally advertised, but when they couldn't get the licensing and DC was already doing it's own thing they settled for what was probably the biggest super-hero RPG of all time, because it was larger than any of the smaller comic companies they might have been able to use, and had an installed fan base of a sort (or so they thought). At the end of the day I think a big part of the problem was they could never made the world "live" because it really wasn't what they wanted and they had lost their original IP. Since the devs weren't exactly into it, this reflected on their quests, world, and everything else. That there was going to be a lack of content was fairly obvious from the beginning, at least to me, and even now with CO still being one of the biggest MMOs on ARC it doesn't exactly seem to get a lot of attention from the people that created it. A bunch of unenthusiastic devs trying to work with a world that was designed to knock off what they actually wanted to do as closely as possible without getting them sued was probably never going to work out. I gave CO a good number of chances as I am a lifetime subscriber, and I have a fair number of top level characters, though how many are still functional given the way they re-wrote game balance a few times is beyond me. For me the real death knell was when they implemented their vehicles system, which I enjoyed. As I got a bunch of free points for being a lifetime subscriber and had taken a long break before that I had a lot of them to spend towards getting one of the really fancy vehicles right off the bat, and I spent a ton of resources upgrading it. I even build a character specifically around the vehicle I was going to use of course. Cryptic at the time said they didn't want vehicles to be a premium feature and despite the way they launched things they always intended top end vehicles to be obtainable during game play. To put it bluntly there were game balance issues, and all kinds of things,but in the end what they decided to do was pretty much lock vehicles out of most of the maps/issues/etc... and make them only viable in very specific places so of course anyone who invested heavily in them lost out, to my knowledge they never exactly made high end vehicles obtainable to everyone which was a big part of the problem as well. It wound up becoming a largely wasted subsystem unless you wanted to pretty much just roam the streets firing at packs of mobs for your kill counter... and even then it seemed like people were screaming because of the way you could one shot entire groups with the right weapons.... assuming of course you found anyone on the increasingly empty server. I will also say that while I don't think CoX ever had the most amazing graphics out there, even for it's time, I thought they were decent and I liked how much you could do with the characters. On the other hand I think CO had disgustingly ugly graphics, I understand what they were trying to do, but I think it failed on pretty much every level. I never had as much fun making my CO characters as I did doing ones for CoX.... and the entire game as much as I enjoyed some of the mechanics occasionally wanted to make me barf while looking at it. I've had people watching me play it literally say "why the heck would you ever play something like that" and these were people like me who will argue graphics aren't everything and who even play entirely text/ASCII based games (Nethack anyone?). I know a few people here have mentioned this too, but I think this was one of the game's biggest problems when you get past everything else... I think people were driven off by a butt ugly game, being RPG fans all the "graphics aren't everything" people gave it a shot, and well... most of them left. I weirdly think they would have done better to make it as a MUD (pure text) than to have released it with those graphics, to this day I cannot fathom exactly what they were thinking when they looked at these graphics designs and felt they were okay, even for the year it came out.

I quite enjoyed both Secret World and Secret World Legends but I drifted away for various reasons, always meant to go back for the Africa content they added, but stuff kept coming up, including getting dragged to other MMOS. To be honest I'm surprised that you speak of it like it's dead, since I could have sworn they just sent me an notification for their 2nd year celebration for "Legends" or something like that, so I was under the impression it was still going decently well. That said after the success of "Exiles" I did hear that the devs were planning on re-focusing on single/multiple player "Conan" games so it's not surprising it's been dying out, especially if they haven't been adding any new content since that last expansion, a major shame because TSW(L) had the best storyline and quests I've ever seen in an MMORPG, not to mention having a unique setting nobody else even tried to knock off. It did get a second chance, but I always suspected their incredibly slow rate of adding content not to mention the way they increasingly catering to elitists was going to kill it. Last time I popped in people were demanding absurdly high item levels (can't remember the term) for content I had already done quite successfully, so just going back to see it again was going to be a pain given the way my cabal had disbanded during my hiatus. Well, at any rate, welcome to CoX, I just installed the game yesterday so I am giving a swing soon. I do some RP, but not a ton of it, and as you can see I'm a rather terrible writer.

Well I'm a little more subtle than that. One of my old villains was called Elfstar who was a mind control themed Dominator whose description was simply "Hi, my name is Debbie, I decided to keep playing Dungeons and Dragons and it's awesome!". It is a reference to this: https://www.chick.com/products/tract?stk=0046 At any rate, I got a lot of questions about why Elfstar was not an elf, and not even remotely star themed, and I think maybe 4 people got it on their own all together, and I spent a lot of time explaining it. I figured at the time there would be more of us around who remember (and mock) the old RPG hysteria of the 80s and 90s (I mean even now I'm only 43). I decided to play blue side (and I want the Ice/Dark corruptor I'm thinking of to be on the villain side or start in going rogue) so I just made a far less subtle double entendre into a character. I have a girl running around in a rather unsubtle dominatix costume (not create with the costume creator to fully pull it off though) called "The Dungeon Mistress" who if you read her description is primarily a nerd girl who runs a D&D game ... and also exactly what the name and costume imply. She's a mutant so I think of her basically as Caitlin Fairchild with the ability to summon her previous trauma from being picked on as a nerd as physical demons (as opposed to wielding actual occult power). I couldn't pick a good secondary for the idea, so I just went with Time Manipulation since I had never used it before... I made a mighty level 2 before I logged off, the big annoyance I was facing was my bloody demon pet doesn't seem to want to attack anything, if it wasn't for the P2W vendor items she'd be totally unplayable and wouldn't have even gotten through the tutorial I'd imagine... at any rate she's the spiritual successor to Elfstar who I didn't try and remake because I figure now even fewer people would get the joke, and it's not funny if you have to continually explain it. :) I will eventually get around to creating an entirely serious character or two once I get used to the game and find more time of course.

Very long time between when you wrote this and this response, if your even still around or care, but I will point out that in "Elder Scrolls" there actually is a canon answer to the history, I currently play "Elder Scrolls Online" and while no lore master I do know a good portion of it. The reason for the questionable nature of the history on certain points is what they call "The Dragon Break" simply put Akatosh, the Dragon God of time had some serious issues and lost control for a while creating a massive temporal distortion. This distortion largely engulfs the timeline around the period of "Daggerfall" and somehow causes all possible endings of the game to be simultaneously true, as it had an ending where you could put pretty much any major faction in charge, unlike other games where there are far less possible outcomes and thus they just have to choose one. The result of the Dragon Break was that Imperial Domination was the way the world proceeded, but you can find records and ruins in places that are basic carryovers from other timelines. Anyone who lived through The Dragon Break wound up with fuzzy recollection of anything up until the point where the timeline was settled by Akatosh.... it's weird, but this is actually part of the lore now, and since Bethesda is into world building they have said they plan to avoid doing anything like Daggerfall where they are that many possible endings to juggle. At any rate if you pay attention to the dialogue you will notice both Oblivion and Morrowwind do have a very set outcome as far as the later games though as they reference the outcome even if they keep the nature of the hero vague for obvious reasons. If "Homecoming" lasts for the long term, and they add more content, it would be interesting to see if they actually do some major world building and explain exactly what happened here. Personally, if they do, I'd sort of hope they don't decide all the previous heroes and villains died... that's a little grim even if it makes sense. Personally I'd try and write it in a way where these realities could exist even if these servers are one day taken down for legal reasons, and I've also wondered for a while if the original servers could return. As I hear it CoX largely collapsed due to problems with the Korean stock market, I don't even pretend to know all the details but the bottom line was supposed to be that while more than popular enough to exist by MMORPG standards at the time, the lack of popularity in Korea caused it to have some sort of attached expenses that affected NCSoft's stock listings on their primary exchange in a way that was costing them more than the game made so they cut it loose for reasons unrelated to the game's overall success or failure. I've read a lot of weird stuff about eastern game design over the years, so it's possible. At any rate, the point is that weirdly Elder Scrolls isn't a good example of how to handle this, because they basically wrote that into the lore as a time warp so they didn't have to actually explain the ending of "Daggerfall" in the series history. :)

Well the problem the OP seems to describe is an issue with pretty much all MMORPGs except for maybe "Guild Wars 2" which was intentionally designed to avoid specifically this kind of issue, and an environment where other players would always be your assistance, and not your competition (outside of PVP of course). The problem is a lot of devs seem to actually like the idea of a competitive environment which is why things as simple as "kill stealing" remain a problem even in many of the newest MMORPGs regardless of how they implement mechanics. If anything the situation has gotten worse as players view each other as non-entities unless they are part of the same peer group (guilds, discord communities, etc..) and it becomes worse as many people who play MMOs tend to migrate from game to game and deal exclusively with basically the same group of people they know from other games. You do still see people recruiting for guilds generally in games like ESO, but at the high end it becomes increasingly cliquish, and if they are ever in need of bringing people in the application processes can be even more ridiculous than what I used to do as an ultra-hardcore WoW player. For example in Elder Scrolls Online (which I play now) you can belong to 5 guilds simultaneously, one guy I knew wanted to join some kind of ranked veteran trial guild, and he had to do *multiple* interviews and levels of play verification, and in addition had to pay in-game gold weekly as an "apprentice ship fee" to be trained by their masterful selves, and also so the guild would get something if they decided he didn't fit in with their tight peer group in the end. At any rate the point here is that "societal norms" is not a thing and it ranges from mildly crazy to outright sociopathic.... some of it can be blamed on the devs who though it up, as a lot of devs think people competing for simple things is fun. What you are experiencing in trying to get that badge for bomb placement is sort of the point of why there is a badge... and of course the guy doing this to you is simply doing what everyone else would do to him. Note that you yourself weren't exactly thinking about giving that bomb to everyone else. In many games I do not chase achievements or whatever specifically for this kind of reason.... at any rate, just be glad your not trying "Black Desert Online" where to advance you need to camp specific spawns apparently, and it's a free for all PVP environment so just to basically hunt mobs you will have groups of guys roaming around murdering people just for the right to hunt the monsters.... just imagine trying to get 200 kills for a CoX badge where anyone who is stronger than you that wants to do the same thing can just walk up and flat out murder you for being in their way.... sadly I doubt we'll ever see MMOs ever evolve to the level of enabling basic human decency as I think the genera is dying and things like "Guild Wars 2" happened too late in the process to inspire other big project... of course that example won't change the fact that I think a lot of game devs actually enjoy the idea of making players harass each other through the mechanics... but that is an entirely different discussion.

Thanks for the responses, that does help a bit. I guess when I have some time (maybe before I head to bed tonight) I'll jump in and look around a bit.

While this is an oldish thread (seems to be a long time since the last response) I figured I'd comment. I'm an older fellow (43) and will say that when I started with this "style" of games they were text based experiences called MUDs. A lot of the MUDs I played were highly RP oriented and largely built and played by people who were heavily into paper and pencil RPGs. Some of the MUDS like one called "Moments In Tyme" which was based on Robert Jordan's "Wheel Of Time" novels was so heavily RP based, that while the game had a huge system of character classes, guilds, and mechanics, you were not allowed to advance beyond a certain point or gain certain abilities until a guild leader (guilds were different than most MMOs, as they were all run by GMs who were also coders and builders) approved you and oftentimes made you do an RP event to justify your advancement within the game's story... and they could be very selective in asking why you build your character in a given way and "it makes me better at killing stuff" was not considered a valid answer. Coming from this kind of environment moving over to things like "Dark Suns: Crimson Sands", "Ultima Online", "Everquest", and "Ascheron's Call" was actually pretty difficult as there was no real RP at all, and indeed attempts to build any kind of RP community was met with scorn, never mind the suggestion that someone's actual power be limited by their RP ability, grasp of game lore, and similar factors. I was part of a group for a while that tried to convince MMO developers to go in that direction, but needless to say it didn't pan out, as several devs bluntly put it, the biggest obstacle to even having a few servers that operated that way is that it would require the GMs to be active with the community in a way most of them did not want to be (they oftentimes compared the idea to baby sitting) not to mention the simple fact that it would require hiring more GMs since any kind of system like this would probably require one per every 50 or so players, and simply put the bean counters would never stand for hiring that way, and nobody was going to take the idea of volunteer GMs who could actually take action in the game seriously... UO *DID* try something like this in the form of "Oracles" but at the end of the day they were pointless since they were literally enabled to do nothing but talk to people, and as far as I could tell they went extinct as a concept by the time I left UO. At any rate, while I used to put a great deal into my online character concepts and such that sort of went away as I did more and more MMOs. Sure there were times where I got involved in some RP, and even a few ERP communities, but for me it was always a part time thing since it felt like a giant waste of time other than the fun of hanging out with people. Of course it should be noted that I've always tended to do a lot of Paper and Pencil RPGs online if nothing else, indeed 5 nights a week I GM a Pathfinder game on Discord, and I'm a player in a couple of Palladium-based RPGs at the moment as well. For a while I got super-hardcore in World Of Warcraft, but sort of dropped down to the level of "filthy casual" where I now drift between games rather than playing any MMO as extensively as I used to, right now in addition to this one (when I find time) I am doing Elder Scrolls Online again for a bit. Of course I did this to myself as I sort of played WoW on an international level for a bit (I was supposed to have been listed on a number of sites around the Lich King era, but I didn't really follow them... as I was too busy playing... and most of them don't exist now anyway) I went beyond burn out and I have a hard time bringing myself to raid beyond even the most basic levels of difficulty even though I'm more than capable of it. Basically I'm one of the few people who has been ultra-hardcore and yet welcomed games doing things like WoW's "Looking For Raid" (although I am not currently playing WoW, as I disliked BfA). I'm considering rolling on the RP server here however, if I do, and if I get involved in some RP, we'll see what happens, as I know they made respeccing rather easy. One other thing is I sort of had a concept for a CoX character that was impossible back when I played, but seems to be quite doable under the current changes.... that might work, though I'd imagine it might be annoying from a game play perspective. I might actually make it as my first character to see how it works out.

Back when I played this came many years ago I was largely using an Ice/Darkness Corruptor. I had to quit playing a few months after villains came out because something the devs did to the game made it so I kept getting "mapserver disconnects"and even their tech people couldn't figure out what went wrong. It irritated me at the time enough where I gave up on the game, and I didn't like how their people kept acting like it was my fault when everything was fine before.... whatever they did. At any rate at the time I was playing I was doing pretty well solo with that, as I wound up having multiple crowd controls, self healing, good damage, and even a bit of stealth. Most groups I joined had no issues with me as well, but my super groups were continually telling me I'd have to re-roll (or respec) if I wanted to do endgame stuff with them because at that time the game was developing more of a "metric" due to people complaining the content was too easy and a lot of the endgame stuff was far more complicated and required people to do specific things and use specific builds. While I'm pretty casual, I would like to eventually see some of that stuff, and I'm not sure how much time I'm going to have to build multiple characters especially seeing as I'm also playing another MMO which I have enough of a hard time with on some levels. I'm just wondering with the passage of years if a character like this would work for both solo and team play? If not does anyone have any advice on what kind of character I could mostly solo with, and would still be welcome in most groups that run this kind of thing occasionally. I do note that there are some talks about people wanting to "speed run" content (a problem with a lot of MMORPGs) and I have no problems with that, so if that is how people do play, what actually works for that kind of thing, while remaining a decent solo experience since I imagine I will be soloing a lot.

Hi, I just found out this existed while checking out a retrospective on dead MMORPGs where the point was made that CoX rose from the ashes. I used to play CoX quite a lot years ago but had to stop a few months after "City Of Villains" came out due to NC Soft, or Cryptic, or whomever was handling the technical end of things somehow breaking their game so I could not stay connected (despite having played reliably before that point), I kept getting this "Mapserver disconnect" within like 5 minutes of logging in and couldn't stay connected more than 30 minutes, I eventually gave up after spending several multi-hour sessions on the phone with their tech support who worked with me on it, but were acting like it was my fault despite the game having worked fine up until something they did on their end, and for the record I had a computer which was overkill at the time.... at any rate I wound up severing ties with CoX before I really got my fill of it, so I am actually looking forward to trying this again and hoping I can make it work. I live in a totally different area, with a totally different computer, and the game was updated numerous times since then, so I am not anticipating any major problems. I do have a few questions though if anyone can take some time to answer some particularly dumb stuff. I am waiting until I have some serious time before I dive in and make a new character. 1. What is this "P2W" vendor I see referenced every once in a while. I am under the impression this game is running under donations right now, and from the way some people describe it, it sounds almost like some kind of a way to obtain tremendously overpowered items for free in the game. I was never hugely into the PVP aspects of the game (though I did enjoy occasionally running into Warburg I think it was called and collecting a missile, of course I rarely ran into anyone that tried to stop me at the time) but wouldn't this create a massive game balance nightmare? I'll play anyway of course, I'm just curious how the game functions if this is what I fear it is. 2. What exactly is an I/O? I've been trying to figure this out, maybe it's a bit of terminology I forgot, but it's been confusing me in trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do in play. I seem to remember CoX operated on a system of mods or enhancements or whatever where you would slot your different powers with mods or whatever they were called to enhance aspects of them. When I played most mods were kind of useless and everyone largely modded for basic things like damage. About a month before things went horrible for me (maybe a bit longer) they underwent some kind of enhancement diversification initiative to force people to use different kinds of mods to be effective. One of the biggest headaches I remember was that while I didn't fight other players very often, to even consider it you pretty much needed to load a ton of accuracy (previously useless) to even be effective, otherwise you couldn't even hit most players that had any kind of defense. I am guessing they re-did the entire power enhancement system? Is there any kind of a guide around that explains how things are supposed to work now so I can plan ahead in the game? 3. I'm not a massive power gamer, and will probably play CoX pretty casually since I'm doing another MMO (Elder Scrolls Online) at the moment as I'm typing this, however I was wondering if there is any kind of a guide to what the current mertrics of the game are? Back when I played CoX a big part of the fun was that you could "wing it" with almost any build and do pretty well, however people complained about it being "too easy" and an endgame was developing where things were more along other MMOs where you couldn't just casually rip through everything, I didn't do much of this for obvious reasons, but if I return I'd probably want to see this at some point, and as a result I assume this means I'll actually have to plan out my build/power set with both casual soloing and group contribution in mind. I'm a pretty casual gamer in general, but I figure if I want to have any chance of actually seeing all the content I missed, I do have to sort of plan to play their way instead of my way so to speak. Connected to this, when I left off I was largely running a Ice/Dark Corruptor which was quite fun as I had a lot of everything including EZ crowd control, good damage, and self-healing which was a lot of fun, of course I was told several times by super groups I was in that I could never take this into what passed for the endgame, and would need to re-roll according to the appearing endgame metrics. I had a lot of characters at the time, so this was no huge deal, but a bit annoying. I figure I should at least put some planning into it. 4. What is this "Going Rogue" thing exactly? As I understand this it's an alternate beginning for CoX and was their second (and last) paid expansion that came after my time. In reading some stuff about it, it seems that the whole idea was to create characters who could cross over between the hero and villain areas, however I've also been reading this re-making of the game has included a method to easily change alignment, and now you could say flat out play a villain character on the hero side or vice versa.... is there any point in "Homecoming" to say making a character who is a Vigilante or Rogue? I'll probably want to do the alternate start at some point just to see it of course, but other than that is any of the other stuff I've been reading in relation to this particularly important? 5. I am not sure whether to play the Red/Blue side, but I wanted to also ask if playing a villain is viable at this point since I never felt like I finished those areas and story lines when I left, I also felt the villain areas were better put together for some reason, of course that might just have been that they were "new". I keep seeing references right now to how there are a lot less people playing villains than heroes, which I suppose is understandable given the genera, but if I was to try and pick up there to begin with I'm wondering if I'd run into a lot of problems due to being unable to find groups and such if I need them. Sorry if this is too much, and I'll appreciate any answers people can give.