CoH Up for Best "Classic" MMOG

[Chris24601]

55 minutes ago, boggo2300 said:

Biggest story of the year is pushing it a little though with Blizzard trying to suicide 😄  the other two categories I voted City

Yeah, I don’t even play WoW (never even tried it), but I have to agree that the 800 lb. gorilla of MMOs committing sepuku is probably the bigger story of the year (that said, I still voted for CoH just out of loyalty).

 

Frankly, one of the biggest problems a LOT of MMOs have had for the past decade is that they set out to be WoW-killers and, for some reason that also means aping 90% of WoWs mechanics (ex. SWToR with its massive gear grind and cookie cutter classes and focus on “progression raiding” guilds).

 

The related problem is the perception that a game with tens to hundreds of thousands of active players is a failure (because it’s not millions like WoW) and leads to pulling all the development resources out of the title and putting it towards the next WoW-killer.

 

The point being; if WoW weren’t such an 800 lb. gorilla, then the AAA game producers wouldn’t have felt the need to spend the last decade grinding out and then dropping support for the slew of WoW-clones we got.

 

While this really made games like CoH shine as a contrast, I think the MMO field as a whole would have been better off if WoW hadn’t exploded like it did.

 

Maybe if it ends up killing itself there will be enough room for fresher ideas to flourish.

[mereman]

and voted☺️

I agree 100% with @Chris24601

[MetaVileTerror]

That's a thoughtful hope, 24601.  You pretty much nailed it, but there's still the overarching problem with out-of-touch publishers kowtowing to greedy investors who demand continuous, unsustainable growth.  The industry as a whole is pretty well divided right now between AAA teetering on the edge of ruin, and indie darlings.  There are a few mid-tier developers and publishers still in the mix, but only enough to point at and say "hey look!  There's one!"  With that current climate, it's actually City of Heroes Homecoming that represents the most significant hope for the future, in my professional opinion.  Granted, I am definitely a little biased, given how impactful City has been in my life.  But this whole rogue server situation is potential lightning in a bottle for the future of games.  It's the sort of treatment that needs to become the normal.  Small, but sustainable, but also; not tiny.  

 

So . . . yeah.  Pretty big news story, this little venture.  Granted, people boycotting acti-blizz is also big news.  It's a shame that more people didn't, in wake of the human rights violation scandal, but after observing trends in this industry for the past twenty years . . . it's more shocking to me that any significant number of people boycotted at all.  Gives me hope.  Been a while since I felt that.

[Zep]

Just barely #1 as of my vote. LETS KEEP IT THIS WAY PEOPLE....

 

Some other really good one on the list. 

 

Never played Runescape... any good (in an inferior to COH) kind of way?

[Marine X]

MassivelyOP Best Classic MMOG Update: 9:45am GMT+5 01/01/2020

 

City of Heroes     24%    1915 Votes

Runescape           22%    1821 Votes

WoW Classic       13%    1051 Votes

 

4 hours ago, Marine X said:

Get out there and Vote, no registration required!

Massivelyop Best Classic MMOG Poll

 

Edited January 1, 2020 by Marine X

[Oubliette_Red]

4 hours ago, boggo2300 said:

Biggest story of the year is pushing it a little though with Blizzard trying to suicide 😄  the other two categories I voted City

I voted for both.

[Bill Z Bubba]

Done.

[McCavity]

And as of this morning, COH beat out Runescape to become, according to Massively Overpowered's poll, The Best Classic MMORPG Still Running at the End of 2019 !

https://massivelyop.com/2019/12/30/leaderboard-whats-the-best-classic-mmorpg-still-running-at-the-end-of-2019/

 

[Marine X]

MassivelyOP Best Classic MMOG Update: 3:15pm GMT+5 01/01/2020

 

City of Heroes     24%    2034 Votes

Runescape           22%    1854 Votes

WoW Classic       13%    1066 Votes

 

5 hours ago, Marine X said:

Get out there and Vote, no registration required!

Massivelyop Best Classic MMOG Poll

Polls are still Open, CoH is also the leader in the biggest MMO surprise of 2019.

Edited January 1, 2020 by Marine X

[Abraxus]

23 minutes ago, Marine X said:

MassivelyOP Best Classic MMOG Update: 3:15pm GMT+5 01/01/2020

 

City of Heroes     24%    2034 Votes

Runescape           22%    1854 Votes

WoW Classic       13%    1066 Votes

 

Polls are still Open, CoH is also the leader in the biggest MMO surprise of 2019.

Not a surprise to me. Just recognition long deserved.

[Lines]

Eat it, Run Escape

[Chris24601]

7 hours ago, MetaVileTerror said:

That's a thoughtful hope, 24601.  You pretty much nailed it, but there's still the overarching problem with out-of-touch publishers kowtowing to greedy investors who demand continuous, unsustainable growth.  The industry as a whole is pretty well divided right now between AAA teetering on the edge of ruin, and indie darlings.  There are a few mid-tier developers and publishers still in the mix, but only enough to point at and say "hey look!  There's one!"  With that current climate, it's actually City of Heroes Homecoming that represents the most significant hope for the future, in my professional opinion.  Granted, I am definitely a little biased, given how impactful City has been in my life.  But this whole rogue server situation is potential lightning in a bottle for the future of games.  It's the sort of treatment that needs to become the normal.  Small, but sustainable, but also; not tiny.  

The trick though is that Homecoming rests a bit on the shoulders of giants in the sense that the vast stores of content here were developed by a fairly good sized staff of paid employees and the game had a previously established fanbase.

 

It’s one thing to get by on monthly goodwill donations and devs working on small additions in their free time when the total works out to a dollar or so per player because you’ve got a large group of players with plenty to keep them occupied.

 

It’s another entirely when that costs jumps to tens of thousands per month split between an initial playerbase of a few hundred because it’s just launched and the only way to churn out sufficient initial content is to pay several people to work on the game full time (we’re talking expenses in the range of $5k per month for each full time programmer/graphic artist/animator on staff on the low end).

 

In other words, Homecoming is a great model to sustain/slowly improve an existing game, but probably not all that great for developing one from scratch.

 

But there’s two interrelated aspects that makes CoH much more of a perfect storm that would be difficult to copy for other games.

 

First, CoH isn’t really in competition for market share with anything else in NCSoft’s wheelhouse. It’s a relatively non-grindy MMO themed around the distinctly American concept of superheroes. There is basically no overlap in the audience for CoH and NCSoft’s other games... which means it’s existence isn’t costing NCSoft any revenue.

 

In short, it’s not in competition with it’s parent company the way the WoW emulators were before the release of WoW Classic.

 

The second factor is that CoH’s IP isn’t owned by a third party and, in fact, isn’t being used in anything more than a token capacity by NCSoft. This is why you’ll never see an official server for Star Wars Galaxies or Marvel Heroes (in addition to ticking off The Mouse, the former is also semi-competition for current license holder EA/Bioware’s SWTOR).

 

As much as I’d like a more community focused approach, the amount of work to launch and grow a community coupled with typically being competition to the owner’s business and the prospect of third-party IP rights makes CoH very much the exception that proves the rule rather than revealing some previously unrecognized path.

[Ade Lucas]

8 hours ago, Chris24601 said:

Yeah, I don’t even play WoW (never even tried it), but I have to agree that the 800 lb. gorilla of MMOs committing sepuku is probably the bigger story of the year (that said, I still voted for CoH just out of loyalty).

 

Frankly, one of the biggest problems a LOT of MMOs have had for the past decade is that they set out to be WoW-killers and, for some reason that also means aping 90% of WoWs mechanics (ex. SWToR with its massive gear grind and cookie cutter classes and focus on “progression raiding” guilds).

 

The related problem is the perception that a game with tens to hundreds of thousands of active players is a failure (because it’s not millions like WoW) and leads to pulling all the development resources out of the title and putting it towards the next WoW-killer.

 

The point being; if WoW weren’t such an 800 lb. gorilla, then the AAA game producers wouldn’t have felt the need to spend the last decade grinding out and then dropping support for the slew of WoW-clones we got.

 

While this really made games like CoH shine as a contrast, I think the MMO field as a whole would have been better off if WoW hadn’t exploded like it did.

 

Maybe if it ends up killing itself there will be enough room for fresher ideas to flourish.

It's always the problem with something that does well but doesn't get <other massively popular thing> figures.  WoW is an anomaly, and expecting something like CoX to get those sort of player numbers when it didn't have the public perception is stupid. WoW advertised and sponsored massively popular shows like the Simpsons (another show that killed other fun shows because they were successful, but not Simpsons successful) while other MMORPG's never took advantage in the same way. Even now, when superhero interest has been at it's peak for the last decade there has been no concerted effort to cash in on it's popularity. If they had brought back an updated CoX, or DCO or Champions had pulled their fingers out then they could have had a licence to print money. The player base is out there, the trick is to recognise and cash in when it's booming. Now the whole Thanos thing is over it's going to be interesting to see if Marvel can keep going with the new set of movies. In a way they shot themselves in the foot with the success of Avengers: Endgame. It made TOO much money and executives and investors aren't going to be happy to settle for less than that going forward. They aren't going to accept something making less than a billion a time and will almost certainly kill any interesting but obscure properties going forward. To comics fans Doctor Strange and Thor were no-brainers, to the general public it was "who?". Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant Man were serious gambles, but good writing, casting and budget lifted them up to top tier properties. If the ones coming forward  like  Shang Chi and Eternals don't catch the imagination then it will be a closing in and endless guardians, Spiderman and Black Panther sequels. CoX was never going to get WoW numbers but it didn't do well in the asian markets so they cancelled it without a moments hesitation and even though the games they concentrated on were all massive in the east, they never got a foothold in the west in the same way CoX did. IP owners are often very shortsighted. They chase the potential money they don't have instead of concentrating on the money they do have. Ignoring the existing audience for a mythical potential new audience has recently crashed and burned several franchises. Terminator, Star Wars, Charlies Angels, Ghostbusters. All told the existing audience these properties aren't for you. We want a new audience. They changed them up and filled them with SJW nonsense because Twitter told them to then made surprised Pikachu faces when the existing audience took them at their word and left, and the potential new audience never materialised.

[Nafsmar]

Still in first place by 3% over Runescape. Go COH!!!

[Abraxus]

1 hour ago, Chris24601 said:

The trick though is that Homecoming rests a bit on the shoulders of giants in the sense that the vast stores of content here were developed by a fairly good sized staff of paid employees and the game had a previously established fanbase.

 

It’s one thing to get by on monthly goodwill donations and devs working on small additions in their free time when the total works out to a dollar or so per player because you’ve got a large group of players with plenty to keep them occupied.

 

It’s another entirely when that costs jumps to tens of thousands per month split between an initial playerbase of a few hundred because it’s just launched and the only way to churn out sufficient initial content is to pay several people to work on the game full time (we’re talking expenses in the range of $5k per month for each full time programmer/graphic artist/animator on staff on the low end).

 

In other words, Homecoming is a great model to sustain/slowly improve an existing game, but probably not all that great for developing one from scratch.

 

But there’s two interrelated aspects that makes CoH much more of a perfect storm that would be difficult to copy for other games.

 

First, CoH isn’t really in competition for market share with anything else in NCSoft’s wheelhouse. It’s a relatively non-grindy MMO themed around the distinctly American concept of superheroes. There is basically no overlap in the audience for CoH and NCSoft’s other games... which means it’s existence isn’t costing NCSoft any revenue.

 

In short, it’s not in competition with it’s parent company the way the WoW emulators were before the release of WoW Classic.

 

The second factor is that CoH’s IP isn’t owned by a third party and, in fact, isn’t being used in anything more than a token capacity by NCSoft. This is why you’ll never see an official server for Star Wars Galaxies or Marvel Heroes (in addition to ticking off The Mouse, the former is also semi-competition for current license holder EA/Bioware’s SWTOR).

 

As much as I’d like a more community focused approach, the amount of work to launch and grow a community coupled with typically being competition to the owner’s business and the prospect of third-party IP rights makes CoH very much the exception that proves the rule rather than revealing some previously unrecognized path.

I'd say Valiance Online, Ship of Heroes, and the other "CoH Successor" basically proved how hard it is to get something off the group from scratch, even if they too were building on the best elements of a previous game.  Some have gotten further than others, but it will be quite some time before any of them have something in Beta, and then again, live.

[boggo2300]

55 minutes ago, Abraxus said:

I'd say Valiance Online, Ship of Heroes, and the other "CoH Successor" basically proved how hard it is to get something off the group from scratch, even if they too were building on the best elements of a previous game.  Some have gotten further than others, but it will be quite some time before any of them have something in Beta, and then again, live.

I think it's very unlikely the two you mentioned Valiance and Ship of heroes will do anything but faceplant, I was pleasantly surprised with the City of Titans release of their character generator, thugh they are a long way behind where they should be, they are much further along than I thought they were

[TechPappee]

Done,

 

Were currently still #1. Keep the votes coming folks!

https://massivelyop.com/2019/12/30/leaderboard-whats-the-best-classic-mmorpg-still-running-at-the-end-of-2019/

[Leogunner]

I can certainly see Runescape being an option since you can play it on mobile too.

 

I voted City of Heroes and FFXI as I was actually surprised I could pull up my 10 year old account and start where I left off while using solo NPCs.  The NPCs are kinda like Pokemon where you have to quest to get some of the special shiny ones.

[Charistoph]

WoW Classic is in an odd place for me.  With everything where it is, I actually preferred Wrath's general set up out of the older expansions of WoW, and that's mostly because I was a Druid player and could actually play a druid the way it was intended.  Classic was rough as a Druid, though.  So, I didn't vote for it.  I would often share subs between CoH, WoW, SWtOR and occasionally one other.

 

Besides CoH (which is the only one on there I see as present on a technicality as last year it wouldn't even BE on the list) I voted for Dark Age of Camelot (though, I should have submitted for SWtOR, too), as it scratched a different itch for me and had a lot more interesting builds, over all, out of all the MMORPGs I've tried.  The Theurgist was the first character I had ever reached max level with in a MMORPG, though I never got him up to max Realm Rank or the other alternative advancements with him.  I didn't do it with WoW until Draenor, and I still haven't done it City of Heroes, even with Homecoming (WAY too much altoholism in this one). 

 

SWtOR I managed to get a couple characters to max level before their first expansion, but the story drive of it helped keep me going and pushing forward with it in a way that no other MMORPG did for me, but I haven't moved on from the original, and won't until I complete all the class' stories.  Oddly enough, I think that is why I like Wrath, Pandaria, Draenor, and Legion out of the WoW expansions as they had a steady story to drive your questing, while most of the others sent you all over the place on fetch quests.

[Marine X]

MassivelyOP Best Classic MMOG Update: 9:00am GMT+5 01/02/2020

 

City of Heroes     26%    2190 Votes

Runescape           22%    1897 Votes

WoW Classic       13%    1081 Votes

 

17 hours ago, Marine X said:

23 hours ago, Marine X said:

Get out there and Vote, no registration required!

Massivelyop Best Classic MMOG Poll

Polls are still Open, CoH is also the leader in the biggest MMO surprise of 2019.

 

Edited January 2, 2020 by Marine X

[Shred Monkey]

I think this is a real testament to the greatness of this game.  The player base is actually much larger and much more active than many (what shall I call them?) "commercially active" MMOs.  

 

 

[Marine X]

MassivelyOP Best Classic MMOG Update: 1:30am GMT+5 01/02/2020

 

City of Heroes     26%    2225 Votes

Runescape           22%    1900 Votes

WoW Classic       13%    1082 Votes

 

7 hours ago, Marine X said:

On 1/1/2020 at 9:44 AM, Marine X said:

Get out there and Vote, no registration required!

Massivelyop Best Classic MMOG Poll

Polls are still Open, CoH is also the leader in the biggest MMO surprise of 2019.

 

Edited January 2, 2020 by Marine X

[gameboy1234]

I vote on this yesterday.  I wonder if voting twice breaks any laws?

 

Seems to work...

[Marine X]

MassivelyOP Best Classic MMOG Update: 8:30am GMT+5 01/02/2020

 

City of Heroes     27%    2337 Votes

Runescape           22%    1918 Votes

WoW Classic       12%    1086 Votes

 

20 hours ago, Marine X said:

Polls are still Open, CoH is also the leader in the biggest MMO surprise of 2019.

On 1/1/2020 at 9:44 AM, Marine X said:

Get out there and Vote, no registration required!

Massivelyop Best Classic MMOG Poll

 

[Oubliette_Red]

On 1/1/2020 at 2:15 PM, Marine X said:

 

Polls are still Open, CoH is also the leader in the biggest MMO surprise of 2019.

 

On 12/31/2019 at 7:01 AM, Marine X said:

Get out there and Vote, no registration required!

Massivelyop Best Classic MMOG Poll

 

 

 

 

Edited January 4, 2020 by Oubliette_Red