City of Heroes vs. Champions Online - The Data

[Shred Monkey]

What Champions Online does, it does pretty well, imho.  The costume creator is hands down better then CoH, which is saying a lot.   The endgame has some content that personally I find better built than most all of CoH.   There are fights that are hard enough that you may legitimately fail.   The biggest downside with Champions Online is that you can do nearly everything the endgame offers in about a 2 hour span before you'll have to start repeating yourself.  They have some weeky content and seasonal content that rotates, but after awhile that gets old, too.

 

In the end, I realize I was only playing it because CoH was gone.  I have a lifetime subscription to  CO... but after I downloaded Homecoming, I never once logged back into CO.

 

[Blastit]

2 hours ago, Sovera said:

To me it's increasing the waist. If it's not maxed it doesn't look right to me.

 

I have a friend with whom we play a game of 'spot the thirsty guy' by pointing characters with min slider waist and max slider breasts.

The secret tip to winning this game every time is checking for who has maximized the booty.

[ArchVileTerror]

Excuse you, Sovera!

I'll have you know that not all of us who are super thirsty are guys!

[Dahkness]

On 3/20/2020 at 1:24 PM, The Philotic Knight said:

Over 2400 players in the middle of a Friday during the work week? That's pretty darn good if you ask me, for an over 15 year old game 

 

covid 19 is why. My work has closed down so sure I’ll jump on 

[The Bobby Llama]

10 hours ago, kiramon said:

which leads into 

7: they also neglected buffs as a whole- so their supports became basically “healers” only... 

My experience was the opposite, that the healing powers are pretty bad.  A 2.5k heal after a ~2 second charge up isn't much help to your 15k HP tank if they get into trouble.  On the other hand, bubble powers are godly because there's no cooldown and they work like absorb in CoH.  A support character can carry a bad team by spamming bubbles on whoever is taking aggro (which can also be themself for easier content like Alerts).

Edited March 22, 2020 by The Bobby Llama
Little extra clarification.

[quixoteprog]

Not sure what this analysis proves, though. You realize that CoX is essentially free to play. Even though plenty of people make donations to keep it running they don't have to any many don't. It also WAS a professionally developed game back by a multi-national corporation, just like Champions online, before it was closed down. One would expect that if people could get any kind of a comparable experience without paying for it they would take that instead of the paid option. The fact that so many people don speaks pretty highly for Champions.

[Generator]

My problem with CO was never a game problem, it was more of a Jack Emmert problem.

 

From the moment that game was announced, he suddenly pivoted and started s**t-talking COH, in an effort to hype up all the things CO was allegedly going to do better.  Given that he had spent the preceding decade making COH, this struck me as more than a bit of a credibility gap.

[TheOtherTed]

Consider also the fact that COH Homecoming may still benefit from the "homecoming" effect.  I can't speak for other players, but I know my own cycle with MMOs follows a standard pattern:

• Phase 1 - playing as often as I can and trying out new things
• Phase 2 - playing regularly, but not as frequently as before
• Phase 3 - popping in once or twice a week to catch up with in-game friends
• Phase 4 - popping in once a month (or even once a year), mostly for nostalgia's sake
• Phase 5 - (very rare) well and truly done with the game; zero interest in even poking my nose in.

I had hit phase 4 in the original game a couple of years before shut-down.  I'm still in phase 4 with regards to CO (and a few others).  Now, however, I'm right back in phase 1.  Had COH stayed "alive" all these years, there's a good chance I would have reached phase 5 by now.

[Generator]

57 minutes ago, quixoteprog said:

You realize that CoX is essentially free to play.

It's my understanding that CO is free to play too, so I think we're pretty apples-to-apples there.

[Dreamboat]

22 minutes ago, Generator said:

It's my understanding that CO is free to play too, so I think we're pretty apples-to-apples there.

It's been a few years since the last time I checked in, but when I did tons of costume options, power selections, and the ability to use the freeform system were still for paid subscribers only. Did they drop that? If so, I might actually reinstall...

Edited March 22, 2020 by Dreamboat

[SwitchFade]

Co was the worst kind of terrible.

 

Costume creator was garbage. Everything looked pastelly.

 

Stupid default border art.

 

Character proportions were retarded. Necks 12 inches long, faces twisted up, feet too big, arms like stretch Armstrong.

 

Movement was worse than bad, running looked completely stupid. Costume clipping was horrid.

 

Blocking was epicly dumb, I have to block to... Why?

 

Powers were boring and generic.

 

Small world. No content. No community. Nothing.

 

It was a beta version of a poorly haphazard game that was cobbled together and abandoned. They should be ashamed.

[Generator]

Little CO anecdote time:

 

The night the shutdown was announced in August 2012, that night on Pinnacle a bunch of us were gathered in the RWZ for what felt like a weird combination of "wake meets last day on campus after college graduation."  There was this one player I was acquainted with who, when someone mentioned that CO was still an option, responded with, "CO plays like the F***-You Fairy s*** in my coffee."

 

Any idea that I could give that game a fair shake died pretty hard right there.  🙂

[Jaguaratron]

2 hours ago, Generator said:

My problem with CO was never a game problem, it was more of a Jack Emmert problem.

 

From the moment that game was announced, he suddenly pivoted and started s**t-talking COH, in an effort to hype up all the things CO was allegedly going to do better.  Given that he had spent the preceding decade making COH, this struck me as more than a bit of a credibility gap.

Emmerts hate and disdain for COH and its players was clear even while he was working on COH, he wanted his own vision which wasnt going to be a marketable success and COH had nothing to do with his desires and he hated that it was a success as couldnt even say "Itold you so", then he had his personal do-over and made CO which was not a success and has less players than nearly everything.

[_NOPE_]

2 hours ago, quixoteprog said:

Not sure what this analysis proves, though. You realize that CoX is essentially free to play. Even though plenty of people make donations to keep it running they don't have to any many don't. It also WAS a professionally developed game back by a multi-national corporation, just like Champions online, before it was closed down. One would expect that if people could get any kind of a comparable experience without paying for it they would take that instead of the paid option. The fact that so many people don speaks pretty highly for Champions.

No, it doesn't speak highly of CO at all. Because CO is ALSO free to play.

[_NOPE_]

2 hours ago, Hops said:

 

covid 19 is why. My work has closed down so sure I’ll jump on 

Yeah. But that should have also affected CO as well. My point still stands. When people have a choice between CO and CoH, guess where the vast majority goes? 

[Generator]

@Jaguaratron, oh I definitely remember that Jack's direction for the game was... we'll be kind and say "idiosyncratic" (I'm thinking of his fervent opposition to showing us real numbers, and also that Boss change at I3, allegedly inspired by a super tough boss fight he had on a Game Boy, and now having thought about that I'm suppressing a facial tic).  I won't lie, I wasn't all that broken up when he parted ways with Paragon.

[kiramon]

3 hours ago, The Bobby Llama said:

My experience was the opposite, that the healing powers are pretty bad.  A 2.5k heal after a ~2 second charge up isn't much help to your 15k HP tank if they get into trouble.  On the other hand, bubble powers are godly because there's no cooldown and they work like absorb in CoH.  A support character can carry a bad team by spamming bubbles on whoever is taking aggro (which can also be themself for easier content like Alerts).

Using the wrong healing power 

[lordpsymon]

21 hours ago, DR_Mechano said:

When playing CO the FIRST thing I would do on making a new character would always be to shorten the arms because of this. Mind you in CoH the first thing I do on female characters is shorten the legs because I swear the leg proportions are off in CoH, especially if you make a max height female character it feels like they become 80% leg.

As someone who is 80% leg IRL, I see nothing out of the ordinary here.

[UltimateXao]

On 3/20/2020 at 4:27 PM, Blastit said:

I do rather like the blocking system, though. I also liked that you could tweak CO controls to the point of essentially fighting by using a targeting reticle instead of tab targeting. Made for a very dynamic feeling.

CO did a lot of things that blow CoH out of the water, stuff that the superhero genre absolutely needed.

 

Shame they built the entire thing on top of the corpse of CoH's design, both the bad AND the good.

 

CoH is a game that, in a lot of ways, didn't age well. There's a ton of stuff that feels incredibly dated, mostly because it IS dated (conventions that came out of more limited technology, mostly. Some design stuff, too, though). But the few things that did age well are things incredibly fundamental to making an MMO work properly. Such as allowing very easy mission coordination where everyone gets rewards, very easy team building and PUGing, especially once all the ATs were open to both sides, which fixed the cookie cutter trinity design blueside. 

 

CO's regressive design on that front is one of the two big things that actually killed the game. People DO solo in MMOs. Frequently, even. But few people solo most of the time. And most players want to team up where possible. Especially if it increases XP! CO made coordinating this a dumpster fire, and any other games in the genre should be very careful to emulate CoH instead of CO in this regard. Honestly, almost all team based games should try and emulate CoH when it comes to this. Warframe, for instance, more or less uses similar design, and it puts a PUG matchmaking queue on top of it.

 

Back to the sad story of CO, though.. The other problem being the developer's complete and total obsession with nerfing, and the weird half baked design that was seen all across the powers and build systems.

 

The freeform system was terrific, but it became a bane of the game because people min maxing got so many things nerfed that pretty much everyone had to min max just to get an effective character. They did start to fix this eventually, but then they brought on a developer that fancied himself a WoW dev wannabe, who started nerfing again, designing really, really broken bosses (one shot damage everywhere) and was obsessed with emulating the endgame gear grind other games have (CoH developed this problem too, if I'm being fair, but they mitigated it better).

 

Blocking was a nice addition, but the way it worked was really clunky and half assed. It didn't stop crowd control, so the moment you let go you were instantly stunned. Enemies didn't experience blockstun or any kind of parried state, regardless of how well you timed it, so mechanically its functionality was flat. You can't "block and punish" enemy shtick attacks like you can in a proper action game. Block was functionally just a damage reduction that lasted as long as you held down the button. Bit underbaked.

 

There was a lot of stuff in the game like this, many powers and upgrades had interesting concepts that just didn't function well or were underpowered to the point of uselessness in practice. There are these little inklings that they wanted to better integrate travel powers into combat, the fact they used no energy and auto suppressed down to something comparable to running hover or combat jumping, so there was no need to switch between travel powers constantly, it was brilliant.

 

But they short changed what could be done with that, Superspeed had this interesting upgrade that was supposed to allow you to deliver more damage from an attack if it was executed after moving at high speed, but there was no meaningful system for building speed (it was all or nothing, like in CoH) and the ability didn't even seem to do anything (it probably did, but was so weak it was difficult to see what it was doing).

 

...I say all this to make a pretty basic point: The CoH relaunch seeing such success is one part legacy and nostalgia, and one part complete incompetency on the part of its competition. You can tell a similar story to the one here about CO for DCUO and probably any other bit competitor that came out.

 

Which I actually say to make another pretty basic point: There is a vacuum in the market to capitalize on here. Anyone who wanted to make a new Superhero MMO right now would be facing virtually no modern competition. Hint hint.

 

If Homecoming can snag the licence, and they have the talent to do it right, considering an actual CoH2 might not be a bad idea.

Edited March 22, 2020 by UltimateXao
Used an absolute where it wasn't factually accurate.

[_NOPE_]

Thanks for your perspective, @UltimateXao. 

[Jaguaratron]

1 hour ago, UltimateXao said:

 

...I say all this to make a pretty basic point: The CoH relaunch seeing such success is one part legacy and nostalgia, and one part complete incompetency on the part of its competition. You can tell a similar story to the one here about CO for DCUO and probably any other bit competitor that came out.

 

 

Whats really sad is the guy (Emmert) who didnt have the kudos or muscle at the beginning to push his vision on COH whose successes gave him the muscle which allowed him to make CO in his vision and it was a much worse game has gone on the fk up DCUO as well....

 

I feel you did COH a disservice though, its aged pretty well all in all and twitch systems like blocking is a failure in a MMO because it alienates people who are not fast reacting, differently able and aging gamers, in other words those who are likely to be retained for a long run as opposed to drop it for a new shiny.

[Blastit]

12 minutes ago, Jaguaratron said:

Whats really sad is the guy (Emmert) who didnt have the kudos or muscle at the beginning to push his vision on COH whose successes gave him the muscle which allowed him to make CO in his vision and it was a much worse game has gone on the fk up DCUO as well....

 

I feel you did COH a disservice though, its aged pretty well all in all and twitch systems like blocking is a failure in a MMO because it alienates people who are not fast reacting, differently able and aging gamers, in other words those who are likely to be retained for a long run as opposed to drop it for a new shiny.

CO's blocking wasn't more twitch-based than CoH's healing or crowd control, though. CoH being real-time instead of turn-based also excludes the differently abled. It's done for the sake of letting you superjump and fly around in real-time and generally play the hero. Having a more dynamic fundamental defensive system in the game for a similar reason could simply be worth it. A line has to be drawn somewhere and it can go either way.

[Haijinx]

In CO, Like many newer MMOs, there is only limited teaming.

 

So it feels like a single player game.

 

A few of those, like Star Wars Old Republic, have enough story for you to 90%+ single player for a while ... 

 

But eventually it gets boring faster than a MMO game with active teams. 

 

 

[_NOPE_]

Why is CoH > CO? If you want to know my opinion, it's all in the attitude, the philosophy. The attitude of CoH when I login is "Hey, go nuts, have fun!" while the attitude I see when I did try to log into CO was "you GOTTA do this, and this and this, and do it fast! Faster! FASTER! Go here, attack that, block! Zap to get endurance back!" 

 

It's the difference between catering towards a casual audience, and catering towards the "gamer" audience. Not everyone always wants to "be a gamer", at least, not all the time, not even gamers. But all of us, ALL OF US, need a break - a place to escape away from all of the pressures and frustrations of daily life. A place where we aren't PUSHED into this or that, where we can just RELAX and go at our own pace. THAT is what City of Heroes does and does well. Even if it's not always Easy, it's always RELAXED. It's Cheers: The Game. 

 

Most MMOs don't offer that. They cater to "gamers" that make their chosen MMO their reason for living after they get off of work - or their second job. They force you into twitch game play, and spending hours and hours grinding to get what you want. They make you go at THEIR pace - just like the rest of the "real world" does. THEY set the rules, and you have to follow them, just like you hear from your boss, or your teacher, or your parents, every day. 

 

City of Heroes, just wants you to come and play, whenever you want, for as long as you want, whatever you want to do. It's all about you, and what you want to do. And that, is what makes all the difference. 

[Jaguaratron]

26 minutes ago, Blastit said:

CO's blocking wasn't more twitch-based than CoH's healing or crowd control, though. CoH being real-time instead of turn-based also excludes the differently abled. It's done for the sake of letting you superjump and fly around in real-time and generally play the hero. Having a more dynamic fundamental defensive system in the game for a similar reason could simply be worth it. A line has to be drawn somewhere and it can go either way.

1000x more twitch based than turn on your defensive toggles and go have fun, my mother in her 60s played COH and still does, thats a long haul customer base, "dynamic" defensive systems are for consoles, not MMOs because a MMO has to appeal to the largest demographics possible and those who buy the most games (young, twitchy, short attention spans) are not a retainable market which is great for pump and dump product distributors ala EA.

 

People forget what COH was like at launch, with mutually exclusive defensive toggles, only regen had a real mez protection system with their "defensive" settings, Unyeilding was called Unyielding stance and meant you couldnt move which lead to "teletanking" which was originally considered an exploit. The game evolved from that into the easy to get into fun game we know, evolve is the important word there, it changed for the playerbase whereas today "developers" seem to expect players to change according to their "visions".

 

CO is a poorly designed game, its entire experience is a bad parody of itself that you can never take seriously so you WILL never take it seriously so emotional investment will not occur which means its a complete disaster for a MMO.

 

DCUO is a compromised design trying to straddle console/pc and as a result doesnt endear itself to PC players because they are forced into the remit and limitations of consoles.

 

COH however had to adapt to survive and wasnt closed because it was a commercial failure, it was still making money, still making profit while the stories of why it was closed down are a little murky it wasnt due to the game itself.