What Makes CoH Great?

[Gremlin]

Back in the before times, when CoH was a subscription only game, I remember reading a list of the average subscription periods for various MMOs. IIRC, they were usually around 6 months but CoH was double that. There clearly is (or was) something unusually sticky about CoH. Is that still true, and if so, why?

[Blastit]

One big thing is the wide range of characters that can be made. The costume creator was a pretty dang big deal. Switching from an invulnerability tanker to an ice tanker is a big enough change to nearly count as a new class in other games, to say nothing of the gameplay variety you could get from switching to another AT. That's still true, at least.

 

That teaming felt so good is another thing that I think contributed. Rewards were always individual so there was no loot drama either. Two scrappers could team up with a defender and instantly feel the difference. That buffs and debuffs were designed to be short-lasting but impactful is one of the better design decisions the developers made. Duoing with a fighter AT and a support AT is still great fun.

[Grouchybeast]

54 minutes ago, Gremlin said:

There clearly is (or was) something unusually sticky about CoH. Is that still true, and if so, why?

It's the people who don't wash their hands before playing.

[nihilii]

When it comes down to it, the core gameplay loop is great.

 

Creating your costume. Activating powers. Leveling up and picking new powers/slots.

CoH is chock-full of meaningful decisions on micro and macro level. Agency makes for strong player engagement.

[RikOz]

WoW is the only other MMO I've played enough to make direct comparisons, and it happens that CoH has been the only MMO since 2008 that has been able to steal me away from WoW. When it comes to game mechanics (so ignoring the costume creator, which I love so very very much), there is one biggie for me:

 

Every aspect of character building is not balanced around endgame or PvP.

 

That is the big one for me, as somebody who prefers to play "DPS" classes but does not particularly enjoy "endgame" or "group content". I prefer to play solo, and so I hugely appreciate the fact that every scrapper, brute, blaster, sentinel, and stalker I roll is, to one degree or another, completely viable for solo adventuring.

 

This kind of thing contributed to WoW driving me away back in 2011, during the Cataclysm expansion. My #2 character at the time was a fire mage, and I'd had a blast playing that character during the previous expansion. But Blizzard has a tendency to completely redefine classes with each expansion, and when Cataclysm came out the changes to fire mages ruined my character, at least as far as it fit my playstyle. They decided that, since a mage is supposed to be a "glass cannon", they would completely nerf its defenses (among other changes). After all, why does a mage need strong defense when there's a tank and a healer in the raid? Well you see, jackasses, there isn't necessarily a handy tank and healer nearby when I'm leveling. They took the mage spell, "Mana Shield", which previously absorbed a good chunk of damage before failing (you still had to play carefully - if you let yourself get overwhelmed by multiple enemies, they'd take that shield down in a hurry and you'd find yourself unable to cast it again because it was still on cooldown) and nerfed it to the point that it would absorb damage about equal to a single hit from an even-leveled enemy, but retained the same long cooldown. The other change they made to Mana Shield is that it no longer improved with your level. It was the same at level 85 as it was at 80, and so became more and more useless as your character (and the enemies) got more powerful. Instead, they thought mages should use crowd control. Which, again, is great in a raid where there are multiple players with CC abilities. Not so great for solo leveling when the single-target CC has a long cooldown and the AoE CC has this nasty habit of hitting every mob around you and aggroing all of them, including nearby "neutral" mobs who usually ignore you unless you attack them first. So when the CC breaks you now have twice as many angry mobs attacking you. And CC wasn't even a useful "escape mechanism" to CC and then run away, because once you'd CC a mob, you were considered "in combat" until either you or the mob was dead, or else you'd run (on foot, because you can't summon a mount in combat) halfway across the zone.

 

So, once CoH shut down and I returned to WoW, my fire mage stayed retired and my shadow priest became my new main spellcaster, and she was awesome. But then, *sigh* a couple expansions later, they redefined shadow priests in such a way that their DPS now depended on a "charge up" mechanism. So now, instead of having a good "sustained" damage output, it required making a series of weaker attacks that would build up a charge, which you could then unleash for a massively devastating attack. Again, that's fantastic in a fight against a raid boss. It completely sucks for leveling, because it translated into "spend a stupid amount of time killing these three normal mobs and then nuke the everloving !@#$ out of the fourth one". That may sound like how brutes work, but no. The nuke would completely drain the built-up charge, and you'd have to start over again with your weak attacks. I hated it so much that I respecced my priest from shadow into discipline - a healing spec that I discovered was actually great for leveling as a damage dealer (the spec has this weird healing mechanic that I never really understood, where you would cast one spell on your allies and then they would receive healing based on how much damage you did to enemies, but that damage was really good and turned out to be great for solo play).

[ArchVileTerror]

Player ownership of and agency over their character are two large motivating factors.

You aren't playing "generic warrior #2 with generic armour plate of +1'ness" . . . you're playing as a character -you- /made/!

That matters for quite a bit for many players.

[Bill Z Bubba]

Cuz the game feeds my scrapperlock in a way very little else has ever been able to do. It doesn't matter if I'm not playing a scrapper. There's a meditative quality to the game, solo or on teams, that was always incredibly soothing and fun. The fact that I can so easily ignore bad quantities, be they stories or people or leveling slogs, is a huge freaking plus.

 

I don't say it lightly, I loved this game before, I love it now. Even if I have spent the last week playing State of Decay 2 instead. The fact that I *know* CoH is again there whenever I need it is fucking joyous.

[MTeague]

1) Before the Invention System, there was no such thing as "Loot".  With the Invention System, all loot is handed directly from the game to each individual player's inventory.  There are no "loot rolls", no instances where the players themselves need to decide "who gets what" with 1-99 rolls, no loot council, no need-before-greed, nothing.  And there are not specific places you have to go to get certain pieces of loot.  It's not "oh, you want Kinetic Combat Acc/DAm? it only drops from this one boss at the end of the third mission on this taskforce and it's only a 20% chance to drop at all, and if one drops, you're competing against 18+ other people who also want it."  In CoH, anything can drop anywhere.   Only real exception is purple recipes and they can drop from any 47+ content.

 

One of the biggest sources of drama / epeen conflicts in any MMO has been who "Deserves" what loot.

City of Heroes bypasses all of that.  It's highly improbable you'll even NOTICE what drops your teammates get, and if you covet a piece of it, too bad, it's assigned, ain't nothing you can do.  

 

2)  "Guilds" are not needed.  This goes right up there with #1, as one of the biggest sources of drama in guilds is the perception (be it accurate or not) of favoritism when it comes to loot drops, or in choices of what instances the guild would focus on for progression.  Super Groups exist, sure.  They can be fun, sure.  But because nobody absolutely NEEDS a constant pre-set group of 25 raiders to do any endgame content with, week after week, month after month, year after year, you don't have the same seeds of resentment forming over time like you might in WoW guidls or EverQuest guilds.

 

3) There is no Holy Trinity.  Meaning no disrespect to anyone's religious beliefs lol.  Here I'm talking about Tank/Healer/DPS concepts.  Sure, archtypes exist.  But you're not funnelled into pre-set configs of "This Raid requires 2 tanks, 6 healers, and 17 DPS, and at least 8 DPS better be Ranged DPS".  You can slap together ANY combination and get damn near ANY content done in this game.  The ONLY possible exception is some Incarnate Trials, and I'm not 100% sure of even those, really. 

 

8 Controllers?  Sure, go to town on ANY TF.  Lockdown City, and you'll all be buffed out the wazoo from the each other's secondary support trees, and there's gonna be so much containment damage going around it ain't funny. 

8 Blasters?  Some of you may take a dirt-nap at some point on the TF, but the Kills to Faceplant ratio will be verrrrrry high.  And if it's a high level TF, probably no one will even die if people are rocking enough set bonuses and making a passing effort to watch each others backs.

8 Defenders?  Try it sometime. No, seriously. Put together an All-Defender-Task-Force sometime.  Lulz as the "low DPS" class, banded together with force multipliers, steamroll over absolutely everything.

8 Tankers?   Sure.  It might be a bit of a slog as damage output isn't the best but ain't no one gonna die except the enemy.

 

Nobody NEEDS anybody.  This keeps people from feeling chains of obligation or "I have to put up with Bob's crap because he's our main tank / best DPS / best heals" and if he de-guilds we won't make it through the instances and then I'll never get those shiny pieces of loot I want.

 

Instead, people can focus on what's FUN.

A good character concept. 

A stylin' costume.

A good backstory.

Finding people you like teaming with.

Rolling in and overpowering the enemy Biff Bam POW style.

[megaericzero]

There's a lot of things from mechanics to quality of life that add up to make COH a fantastic experience.

Taking on huge mobs feels powerful; archetypes feel like complete characters instead of functions; you can choose where to go on your journey and what content to experience per character.

 

What it ultimately boils down to, for me, are the costumes and the power sets.

Other games may have lots of options, better graphics, specific themed options, or solved graphic restrictions like long skirts with martial arts but none of them have the sheer variety of assets that COH has and the fact that costumes have no bearing on stats is a core part of what makes that work. You get to decide how your character works and looks, not the developers and not the meta.

Add on top of that the powersets which you can mix-and-match, adding their own flavors to fulfilling their archetypes' niches and you have yourself a winning formula.

[Haijinx]

In the old days, people used to team in MMOs

 

COH never lost that.  

[Gremlin]

I was pretty sure that you'd all have some interesting perspectives and I wasn't wrong. Thanks very much for taking the time to answer.

[Greycat]

Think most of my answers had been given elsewhere, but:

- No class is needed.

- Corollary, no class is useless.

- And 10 characters from the same AT won't play the same unless deliberately built to.

- PVP isn't forced.

- Teaming isn't forced. Yes, there's some team content in task/strike forces, MSRs and the like, and the original devs forgot this when Incarnates were initially released, but I can easily solo 1-50+

- The game grew "out" instead of "up." You didn't find yourself suddenly having to try to catch up with new loot and 10-20 more levels, and newbies always had people to team with because the old hands weren't 200 levels away. Heck, old characters would drop back down to get new badges, see new contacts and the like.

- Characters are unique, even if they're not dragons. In all the time from i3-sunset on live, I ran into someone with a similar costume (colors, pattern) ... once, that I can think of. And I had two accounts (more, at one point) with a ton of characters. My characters were *mine.*

- No grind. (No, seriously, there's not. Contrast, for instance, Aion, where to keep competitive even in PVE - and PVP was typically mixed with this - you *had* to try to grind out money for, for instance, wing upgrades, or for one specific good suit of decent armor you had to get 5 characters (one piece fell per character) up to some level or other... and then try to trade for stuff for your class on whichever one was going to get the armor.)

- On live, the most common answer would probably be "the community." Hoping that remains the case here. There were many subcommunities that - from various comments - felt safe or felt 'home' in the COH community.

- You don't (some Incarnate content excepted) need any "loot." You don't *have* to have a multibillion inf purpled out build to do anything.

- Most content is instanced, and that stuff that isn't, generally is either populated with NPCs enough everyone that needs it can do it or comes back quickly enough others can get it. (As opposed to, say, "boss sniping" or having a bunch of people sitting and waiting for a spawn. Wish I still had my Tabula Rasa beta screenshots with this loooooooong line of people waiting to get their first... I forget what they called them so I'm just going to say "rune" or "glyph." It was funny, but annoying.)

[Herotu]

If you ever get fed up with the shallow beat-em-up brawling and dive into the lore, it's solid. The stories, if you bother to read them, are great. The writing is superb, I love that we all float along without bothering, knowing that if I decide to pick a story to read, it's going to be good.

 

 

To expand: The signature heroes have great backstories. I love the cape mission that tells you about dead heroes (spoiler) and introduces you to old, has-been heroes. It really broadens the scope for your own creativity,

Edited April 5, 2020 by Herotu

[Llewellyn Blackwell]

1 hour ago, Herotu said:

If you ever get fed up with the shallow beat-em-up brawling and dive into the lore, it's solid. The stories, if you bother to read them, are great. The writing is superb, I love that we all float along without bothering, knowing that if I decide to pick a story to read, it's going to be good.

 

 

To expand: The signature heroes have great backstories. I love the cape mission that tells you about dead heroes (spoiler) and introduces you to old, has-been heroes. It really broadens the scope for your own creativity,

This for me is the single biggest reason I fell in love with the game. The world might seem on the surface abit generic or a parody of the genre with characters like Statesman. Yet the lore of CoH is rich, and creates a great and diverse group of plots to build ones character from and bind them to the game world in a way we just cant in many others.

 

For example on DDO( dungeons and dragons online) because the studio developing it wasnt hand in glove with its owners, they had to generic people who used for example a last name of one of the houses as part of their character to RP being a member of that house. Were as in CoH the devs loved and approved of such things.

[Heraclea]

13 hours ago, MTeague said:

Instead, people can focus on what's FUN.

A good character concept. 

A stylin' costume.

A good backstory.

Finding people you like teaming with.

Rolling in and overpowering the enemy Biff Bam POW style.

Excellent summation.  There are other drama driving mechanics that other games have that CoH doesn't, like gear repair costs.  Most combats are straight-up and don't require elaborate choreography and catherding.  No one uses live voice chat to actually play the game, which I always found immersion breaking. 

[srmalloy]

12 hours ago, Greycat said:

- Characters are unique, even if they're not dragons. In all the time from i3-sunset on live, I ran into someone with a similar costume (colors, pattern) ... once, that I can think of. And I had two accounts (more, at one point) with a ton of characters. My characters were *mine.*

Back on live, I think I saw five different groups of characters that deliberately made identical/similar costumes (such as a knock-off of the Crest Team), and one group that deliberately exploited the way that uppercase "I" and lowercase "l" looked the same to make a group that not only looked the same as each other, but looked like they all had the same name. But in every case, this was done deliberately; I don't know of any characters that had more than grossly similar costumes (barring the ones recreating comic characters -- all the green-skinned Huge males with torn purple pants, for example, or the Wolverine claws/regen scrapper clones).

[Greycat]

15 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

Back on live, I think I saw five different groups of characters that deliberately made identical/similar costumes (such as a knock-off of the Crest Team), and one group that deliberately exploited the way that uppercase "I" and lowercase "l" looked the same to make a group that not only looked the same as each other, but looked like they all had the same name. But in every case, this was done deliberately; I don't know of any characters that had more than grossly similar costumes (barring the ones recreating comic characters -- all the green-skinned Huge males with torn purple pants, for example, or the Wolverine claws/regen scrapper clones).

... Illusion controllers? I think I saw them.

[Grouchybeast]

53 minutes ago, Greycat said:

... Illusion controllers? I think I saw them.

I have a terrible memory, but want to say the name was something like Parallel Illusion.

 

ETA: I was waiting for a trial to start, and saw someone with an almost identical costume to mine but fiery red instead of icy blue.  It was pretty cool, I wish I'd taken a screen shot of us.

Edited April 6, 2020 by Grouchybeast

[ZeeHero]

Creative Freedom, to sum up in only 2 words, is what makes COH great. no other game has done it as well yet.

 

in COH your creative original character and build can be viable in anything.

 

The fact the gameplay/combat system is garbage does not ruin the game, since it's still the best customization and creative freedom out there.

So long as they don't try and focus on gameplay and challenge, the areas where COH is by far weakest, and focus on where it is actually strong, it will do well.

[Greycat]

5 hours ago, Grouchybeast said:

I have a terrible memory, but want to say the name was something like Parallel Illusion.

 

Yeah, that sounds like what I saw.

[Oubliette_Red]

What makes CoH great?

 

I'd have to say a few things:

 

1. The community, where people will help out others whether it be with a mission, a costume, build suggestions, drive-by buffing, or just dropping inf on a random lowbie in AP.

 

2. The community, where folks will spend their time bringing back a game that we all love without expecting anything in return because they love it as much as we do.

 

3. The community.

[Gremlin]

20 hours ago, Herotu said:

To expand: The signature heroes have great backstories. I love the cape mission that tells you about dead heroes (spoiler) and introduces you to old, has-been heroes. It really broadens the scope for your own creativity,

The writing got better and better as time went on. Some of the early arcs are barely enough to justify the mission but the later stuff is well worth reading. Praetoria and Dark Astoria are particular stand outs for me.

Edited April 6, 2020 by Gremlin
Rewrote to convey the intended tone.

[Gremlin]

For me, it feels like the CoH is a playground rather than a game. We aren't restricted to doing whatever the original lead developer thought we'd be doing. We make your own entertainment! This creates an incredibly rich and varied experience. Street sweeping feels very different to doing door missions. Soloing is so different to playing in a full team that it feels like playing two different games and yet I use the same build, on the same toon for both. ...and all the while the community actively encourages you to try new things.

 

I may get bored with the game occasionally but I doubt I'll ever feel that I've experienced everything it has to offer.

[DSorrow]

I think there are several factors, but perhaps the most prominent is the fact that we're not only allowed, but encouraged to play several different characters. In other MMOs, unless you have a lot of spare time, you usually get stuck to one role and that can get boring after a while. What's also great that all of these alts can be played with high-end builds and in end game content with quite modest time investment. The second thing I really like is that all characters are unique. I'm not GenericTank#1543 going for the cookie cutter build and Armor Set of Tanking +5 like everyone else, but I'm making my own build, and a costume that's in no way restricted by my IO choices.

 

Then there's the gameplay which may not be as engaging as some other games, but I still like it. The simple, laid back environment just feels good every now and then when I just want to relax and kill skuls. I don't really miss the days of restarting raid bosses because one person out of 10 did one mistake or taking ages to finish something because one person can't handle the mechanics. If I had to bet, I'd say this is one of the key things that make the community so great because anyone else's lack of experience has so little chance to ruin your fun. Of course, I'd like some more difficult content as well, but it's not really a high priority for me at this time because I can always launch Dark Souls.

[Abraxus]

Basically, the game can cater to any player.  You can make things as easy, or as difficulty as you like.  You can hit the random character generator to produce a new toon, or spend hours making the perfect costume.  You can just take the same powers, and leave them at their default presentations, or you can spend time customizing every individual power, making everything unique.  You can choose from numerous ways to get that new toon from level 1-20.  Street sweep, mission work, task forces, marketeering, farming, incarnate process.  All there, and NONE mandatory.  Spend an hour, spend a day, spend a week solid playing.  There is something for everyone at one end of the spectrum to the other.  My list of played MMOs isn't huge, but this one is the only one that I looked forward to playing, and couldn't wait until I could play again.  When it was gone, it was the only one I missed, and wanted to play.  Now that it's back, it IS the only one I play once again.  And, it just keeps getting better with the new additions, and QoL changes.  

 

Paragon City is my home, and probably will be for as long as it lives.