What does World of Warcraft do better than Cox?

[Sunsette]

That is something I miss from the early days of MMOs -- not just WoW, but Asheron's Call, where I started. It used to be that you could run into people in the wild and they'd be struggling with something hard so you could run past them and just go 'huh' or you could choose to take a moment, get involved, lend a hand. Make a friend. You can still do that a bit in WoW and SWtOR (not as much as you used to) and I imagine FF14. (Confession: I couldn't bring myself to play it for long. But my BFF's a big fan.) A lot of other MMOs these days, and definitely in City of Heroes, that's... not really a thing. The only real outdoors content is 'god DAMNED SNIPERS IN FOUNDERS FALLS!!'

[Legree]

I jumped in not too long before HC went live to play a free 1-20 character, and I was surprised at how much it felt like they were just rushing me through the leveling process.

 

WoW has long regarded basically everything prior to the most recent expansion as an obstacle to be overcome before getting to the 'real game', and that feeling of being rushed is the end result of multiple attempts to smooth the levelling experience - essentially speeding it up and dumbing it down until you're spending three hours or less in a new zone before being hurried along to the next one.

 

It's a trap CoH never quite fell into.  Even once the Incarnate system went live I love that the devs still spent time on lower level content.  If someone at Blizzard proposed revamping an enemy group that only appeared in the first 20 levels of the game I imagine they'd be laughed out of the room, but here we got a revamp for the Skulls and some good story arcs to go with it, to give just one example.

 

But we're being nice about WoW so... it has a very consistent and strong art style which I feel has aged remarkably well, and mechanically - in terms of the minute to minute gameplay - it's incredibly smooth and responsive.  A few years ago I did some perma-death runs (following an agreed upon set of self imposed restrictions like no gear better than white, no potions, no specialisation) and WoW's pitch-perfect controls meant I felt that anytime I died it was my error (or bad luck) rather than the game not responding fast or fluidly enough.

[markofantares]

I play for the lore. I love Warcraft lore. I've read all the books, all the comics, I have all the Compendiums. Questing is my favourite activity in WoW. All my characters have full backgrounds (thank-you City of Heroes/Villains). What's going on with this current expansion is so fascinating. I really like the direction the game is heading.

 

I've been playing pretty much non-stop since Wrath. I just can't play anymore.  But I still check MMO-Champion and Wowhead, weekly.

 

Also: Even if every expansion the game subscriber base is halved - as has been said - That is still millions and millions of subscribers. World of Warcraft still has a massive subscriber base.  Not a lot of MMOs can say they have players in the millions.

[jack_nomind]

WoW lore through the ages:

 

WC1: shut up wizards did it

WC2: wizards did it, now with boats

WC3: demons made the wizards do it

WoW: at the beginning of time, azeroth was ruled by elementals and then cthulhu invaded

BC: everything is elves.  trolls are elves, naga are elves, demons are elves twice removed, it's just elves, all the way down.

WLK: at the beginning of time, azeroth was ruled by cthulhu.  actually only half of everything is elves, the other half is rocks.  humans are soft baby rocks.

Cata: at the beginning of time, azeroth was ruled by dragons, and elementals and cthulhu tried to take it from them but instead just made the dragons evil or crazy, except for red dragons who were never evil or crazy except that time they were.

MoP: nvm about everyone being elves, that was dumb, trolls aren't elves.  elves are trolls.  for real you guys there are three types of people in the world: trolls, rocks, and furries.  let's talk about furries.

WoD: oh shit wait what are orcs

 

[still catching up on legion and bfa lore.  bfa appears to be: female leaders are fickle warmongers, amirite guys]

[joyispunkrolex]

I've never enjoyed a Blizzard game. Warcraft screamed Warhammer rip-off from the word go (I separately have a lot of antipathy for Warhammer as well, so that's not a good sign) and while I've played all the big ones at least a little bit (I lasted about 5 minutes in WoW, up to maybe 20 hours in Diablo), I just don't care for the things that Blizzard does.

 

That being said: WoW has provided the biggest running target for low-end gaming since its introduction. The test for whether a PC could be said to be capable of real PC gaming was its ability to run WoW at the common screen resolution of the day. I'm actually pretty sure "playable WoW" has been the goal for Intel and AMD integrated graphics for a dozen years or more. The cartoon-style graphics were a really great choice for it and it kept the game within reach for a lot more people than any attempt at photorealism. I may think that the art style is dumb AF, but I know a lot of people who were really happy every Wal-mart grade Potato of a PC could render it right.

 

I don't actually have anything else that's nice to say about WoW specifically, but IIRC Blizzard did release patches to update the older Diablo games so they're fully playable on Windows 10, and that speaks to a commitment not often seen in PC gaming.

 

 

[Oubliette_Red]

I would encourage you to pay more attention to the mission texts. I know the lore can be hard to dig out, so perhaps that visibility is something WoW may have done better, but CoH lore is brilliant.

 

+1 inf

 

I only played CoH for just shy of 6 years and there is still content I've not played.

[OEM61]

It's a different game.

 

There are so many differences that it isn't a question of what either game did better, it's just a matter of how each company presented what they had.

 

WoW did fantasy MMO better than CoH.  CoH did superhero MMO better than WoW.

 

I don't know if the WoW UI or the CoH UI are really interchangeable and it's been too long since I have played WoW to really compare the two, but a UI has to be really horrible for it to be a negative factor, and really, really great to be a positive factor.  In other words, that generally doesn't matter to me.

 

The leveling system is totally different.  Some people will prefer one over the other, but that doesn't make either one necessarily "better" than the other.

 

In the end more people liked WoW, so I guess the one thing it did better was get people to like it.

[Heraclea]

Also possibly WoW's lore is wonky as it started out as a Warhammer expy back in the RTS days. Supposedly Warcraft 1 was built around them having the Warhammer license, and they just filed off the serial numbers when the deal died or never actually materialized or whatever. Warcraft's lore in the years since was all generally a ripoff of any number of things, up until WoW came along. At that point they tried cleaning it up and making it something of their own, but it will always have a that mishmash feel.

 

Knowing little of Warhammer, my impression of the WoW backstory was that every once in a while either the Horde or an Alliance found themselves backed into a corner.  When this happened, each would hire a dodgy wizard who would pull their bacon out of the fire by contracting with some evil extradimensional entity.  The side effects always included destroying a major part of the game world. 

[markofantares]

It's a different game.

 

There are so many differences that it isn't a question of what either game did better, it's just a matter of how each company presented what they had.

 

WoW did fantasy MMO better than CoH.  CoH did superhero MMO better than WoW.

 

I don't know if the WoW UI or the CoH UI are really interchangeable and it's been too long since I have played WoW to really compare the two, but a UI has to be really horrible for it to be a negative factor, and really, really great to be a positive factor.  In other words, that generally doesn't matter to me.

 

The leveling system is totally different.  Some people will prefer one over the other, but that doesn't make either one necessarily "better" than the other.

 

In the end more people liked WoW, so I guess the one thing it did better was get people to like it.

 

^THIS

 

The most respectful answer I've heard that accommodates for fans of both games.

 

Because, you can be a fan of WoW and CoH. That's allowed.

[EggKookoo]

Knowing little of Warhammer, my impression of the WoW backstory was that every once in a while either the Horde or an Alliance found themselves backed into a corner.  When this happened, each would hire a dodgy wizard who would pull their bacon out of the fire by contracting with some evil extradimensional entity.  The side effects always included destroying a major part of the game world.

 

A lot of that came later, though. I mean in the details. The simple idea that orcs = green tusked monstrous humanoids is a pure Warhammer thing. Orcs in D&D aren't green and are more just like brutish neanderthal things (they were originally distinctly pig-like but that changed sometime around 3rd edition). Orcs in LotR are largely how they appeared in the movies -- distorted, aggressive elves. Warcraft's interpretation of dwarves is also closely lifted from Warhammer. D&D dwarves now share a lot of those same boisterous, biker-viking attributes but even that came over from Warhammer.

 

Because, you can be a fan of WoW and CoH. That's allowed.

 

It's certainly possible to be a fan of both games but also believe one game did something better than the other. Nothing wrong with comparing strengths.

[jubakumbi]

Because, you can be a fan of WoW and CoH. That's allowed.

 

The really fascinating part is that for some people and thier brain chemistry, it's _not_ allowed...

[haknudsen]

I know we're all probably a tiny bit biased but I really can't think of anything (though that might be because I never got far in wow since I never enjoyed it)

So what does WoW do better than CoX?

 

Literally, nothing.

Yeah, and the Backstreet Boys are the best band ever.

/sarcasm

Yes, nothing at all, that's why it has subscriber numbers in the millions, while free CoX can't bust 100k...

[Charistoph]

Two things that WoW did better than CoX:

 

1) Work off of a popular and well established universe.  Warcraft was incredibly popular, and I enjoyed all 3 games and both expansions before WoW came out.

 

2) Basically self-published.  Blizzard retained all its rights when it published WoW instead of selling its soul to a foreign investor that wasn't directly invested in the labor (instead, they later sold its soul to a LOCAL investor that wasn't directly invested in the labor).

[Xaeon]

I play for the lore. I love Warcraft lore. I've read all the books, all the comics, I have all the Compendiums. Questing is my favourite activity in WoW. All my characters have full backgrounds (thank-you City of Heroes/Villains). What's going on with this current expansion is so fascinating. I really like the direction the game is heading.

 

I've been playing pretty much non-stop since Wrath. I just can't play anymore.  But I still check MMO-Champion and Wowhead, weekly.

 

Also: Even if every expansion the game subscriber base is halved - as has been said - That is still millions and millions of subscribers. World of Warcraft still has a massive subscriber base.  Not a lot of MMOs can say they have players in the millions.

 

It's down to just 2 million subscribers and is expected to drop again with the next expansion as it always does.

[markofantares]

I play for the lore. I love Warcraft lore. I've read all the books, all the comics, I have all the Compendiums. Questing is my favourite activity in WoW. All my characters have full backgrounds (thank-you City of Heroes/Villains). What's going on with this current expansion is so fascinating. I really like the direction the game is heading.

 

I've been playing pretty much non-stop since Wrath. I just can't play anymore.  But I still check MMO-Champion and Wowhead, weekly.

 

Also: Even if every expansion the game subscriber base is halved - as has been said - That is still millions and millions of subscribers. World of Warcraft still has a massive subscriber base.  Not a lot of MMOs can say they have players in the millions.

 

It's down to just 2 million subscribers and is expected to drop again with the next expansion as it always does.

 

Three quarters the population of Toronto, ON. The most populated city in Canada. That's two million people. Even if half those accounts are doubled, that's still 1.5 million people.

 

That's a lot of people.

[Xaeon]

I play for the lore. I love Warcraft lore. I've read all the books, all the comics, I have all the Compendiums. Questing is my favourite activity in WoW. All my characters have full backgrounds (thank-you City of Heroes/Villains). What's going on with this current expansion is so fascinating. I really like the direction the game is heading.

 

I've been playing pretty much non-stop since Wrath. I just can't play anymore.  But I still check MMO-Champion and Wowhead, weekly.

 

Also: Even if every expansion the game subscriber base is halved - as has been said - That is still millions and millions of subscribers. World of Warcraft still has a massive subscriber base.  Not a lot of MMOs can say they have players in the millions.

 

It's down to just 2 million subscribers and is expected to drop again with the next expansion as it always does.

 

Three quarters the population of Toronto, ON. The most populated city in Canada. That's two million people. Even if half those accounts are doubled, that's still 1.5 million people.

 

That's a lot of people.

 

At this rate it'll probably dip under 1 million by the next expansion when Blizzard has another player alienating whoopsie do.

 

And there probably won't be one after that because Blizzard will probably end up EA'd to death by Activision given that it's been a PR laughing stock that's struggled to meet Activision's increasingly delusional expectations of having a Fortnite level endlessly monetizable blockbuster megahit in every genre.

 

 

[markofantares]

I play for the lore. I love Warcraft lore. I've read all the books, all the comics, I have all the Compendiums. Questing is my favourite activity in WoW. All my characters have full backgrounds (thank-you City of Heroes/Villains). What's going on with this current expansion is so fascinating. I really like the direction the game is heading.

 

I've been playing pretty much non-stop since Wrath. I just can't play anymore.  But I still check MMO-Champion and Wowhead, weekly.

 

Also: Even if every expansion the game subscriber base is halved - as has been said - That is still millions and millions of subscribers. World of Warcraft still has a massive subscriber base.  Not a lot of MMOs can say they have players in the millions.

 

It's down to just 2 million subscribers and is expected to drop again with the next expansion as it always does.

 

Three quarters the population of Toronto, ON. The most populated city in Canada. That's two million people. Even if half those accounts are doubled, that's still 1.5 million people.

 

That's a lot of people.

 

At this rate it'll probably dip under 1 million by the next expansion when Blizzard has another player alienating whoopsie do.

 

And there probably won't be one after that because Blizzard will probably end up EA'd to death by Activision given that it's been a PR laughing stock that's struggled to meet Activision's increasingly delusional expectations of having a Fortnite level endlessly monetizable blockbuster megahit in every genre.

 

Even if the subscriptions dips below 500 000 people, that's still a lot of subscribers. Any time someone points out that "WoW is dying" I can't help but wonder what that person considers "low subscribers?" I live in a city of 130 000 people. That's a lot of people.

[Xaeon]

I play for the lore. I love Warcraft lore. I've read all the books, all the comics, I have all the Compendiums. Questing is my favourite activity in WoW. All my characters have full backgrounds (thank-you City of Heroes/Villains). What's going on with this current expansion is so fascinating. I really like the direction the game is heading.

 

I've been playing pretty much non-stop since Wrath. I just can't play anymore.  But I still check MMO-Champion and Wowhead, weekly.

 

Also: Even if every expansion the game subscriber base is halved - as has been said - That is still millions and millions of subscribers. World of Warcraft still has a massive subscriber base.  Not a lot of MMOs can say they have players in the millions.

 

It's down to just 2 million subscribers and is expected to drop again with the next expansion as it always does.

 

Three quarters the population of Toronto, ON. The most populated city in Canada. That's two million people. Even if half those accounts are doubled, that's still 1.5 million people.

 

That's a lot of people.

 

At this rate it'll probably dip under 1 million by the next expansion when Blizzard has another player alienating whoopsie do.

 

And there probably won't be one after that because Blizzard will probably end up EA'd to death by Activision given that it's been a PR laughing stock that's struggled to meet Activision's increasingly delusional expectations of having a Fortnite level endlessly monetizable blockbuster megahit in every genre.

 

Even if the subscriptions dips below 500 000 people, that's still a lot of subscribers. Any time someone points out that "WoW is dying" I can't help but wonder what that person considers "low subscribers?" I live in a city of 130 000 people. That's a lot of people.

Activision would almost certainly pull the plug if it dips below one million and can't rise above that with an expansion spike. Which given the current trend is probably due to happen by about 2022 or thereabouts.

[srmalloy]

I can fly at 40 mph in three dimensions while one-shotting a Nazi with a rocket launcher and dodging shots from robots like a boss in my boss outfit that doesn't mandate overlarge shoulderpads.

 

Don't diss the Shoulders of Doom...    ;D

[Transhumanish]

Polish. People can decry Blizzard all they want, and not personally like [insert thing they make or policy they have here]. But damn, their games are overwhelmingly very, very clean experiences, with tons of detail tossed in everywhere that you might miss the first 1,000 times you walk through an area. Be it WoW, Starcraft, Overwatch, what have you, their games are smooth and clean and people can and do dive into them en masse on day one (and no, crashing because too many people are logging on at once is not a polish issue in the least).

 

That's what Blizzard has traditionally done better than most other studios. Their games are, by and large, whether you like the style or no, polished as ****.

 

Even dropping to their current 1.65 million active population numbers, that still makes them... *checks worldwide MMO population numbers*... oh yeah, still the most populated MMO on the planet. Followed by Old School Runescape at 1.55 million, FFXIV with 1.4 million, then it plummets all the way down to 335,000 with ESO. Those are the top four MMORPG active populations at the moment, and the falloff is tremendous from that point on. And checking the population number curves in MMOs in general? Oh, right, yes. Almost every MMO has been seeing a similar decline in populations at the same rate as WoW. MMORPGs in general simply aren't pulling in the numbers or garnering the same interest they once did in their heyday.

 

So yeah. Love it or hate it or utterly apathetic about it, WoW is still the most popular MMO in the world, one of only three that breaks 1 million active numbers with nothing else going above 350K beyond those top three. That says a lot.

 

And I do believe it comes from their consistent levels of polish few other companies achieve. What does WoW do better than CoX? Polish. By quite a significant amount, at that. Can you imagine if CoX--while keeping its own special feel--had the game world's look itself was as polished as WoW or Overwatch or other Blizzard Games? I mean without giving it WoW's cartoony look, either. Keep the gritty city feel, where people are literally being abducted for body parts on the streets by techno-zombies, cops are getting punched out by punk death cultists wearing skull masks who are asking them with each punch if they're getting the message yet that this ain't the cop's turf no more, and so on.

 

That's what WoW does better.

[Adeon Hawkwood]

Wait... OSR is the second most popular MMO in the world? I did not realize that.

[Seroster01]

Having played both CoH & WoW more individually than any game that isn't either of those, my opinions are a bit mixed.  CoX is my favorite MMO to this day, and while I certainly don't have that level of fondness for WoW I can certainly say it does a few things better than CoH simply because the games have an almost completely different primary focus.

 

WoW is a game completely based around overcoming increasingly difficult group content. Unless your group is exceptionally skilled, it's unlikely that your group will be able to clear the hardest difficulty of the most recent content as soon as it's launched.  These days it usually even takes the world first groups a few weeks of gearing to clear new raids.

Instead, it is expected that you will slowly acquire gear (and in modern wow, other secondary powerups) to make up the gap between the performance requirements and the player's general skill level.  As such, even 2 endgame characters of the same class & spec can have significantly different performance based on the combination of gear luck & gated progression they've put into the characters (all builds are basically identical these days, so there's no real variation for that).  The difference in performance of a freshly level-capped character in modern wow and someone fully geared at the end of an xpac is truly silly. This is all the basic whys of the following statement: WoW has better single-character progression at level cap, allowing you to feel like your character has grown exponentially from the start of an xpac to the end.  Of course this all gets reset every xpac so that's not very fun & ruins a lot of this...

 

A side effect of the first point, combined with general differences in combat mechanics and a whole gamut of design choices/focus means that WoW has much more demanding group content.  As such, there's a bigger sense of accomplishment when you complete a goal.  I can't imagine any group fight I've been in in CoX that was tuned such that the group was expected to spend several nights dying horribly before your gear & experience with the fight would allow your group to overcome it.  I'm not even sure I'd want such a fight in CoX, as I don't think it'd work out very well.  But killing a raid boss me & my buddies had been struggling with for weeks was always extremely satisfying.  It was also extremely satisfying to see such fights go from "BY THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH!" to "Well, that was quick."

 

So for me the basics of things WoW does better than CoH comes down to "WoWs group content is (or at least has the potential to be) much more complex & difficult, and is more rewarding of a long-term focus on a single character."  Does this make it a better game?  That's largely subjective, but my personal answer to this is a resounding "No."  I would much rather be able to scrape together a team of any 8 dudebros I could find on the street & do any content I wanted to in-game than WoW's group setup of having to find exactly the right mix of group size, class comp, proper #s of each role, & enough gear to make it all function.

 

But not everyone is like that, and TBH I think it's relatively telling that the games that aren't focused on that type of "holy trinity" group dynamic are almost always less popular.

[MrAxe]

It has to be a super hero MMO. Theme is what is better for me. Tried WoW briefly and LoTRO kept my interest for over 700 hours. In the end only the best hero MMO does it for me, though. If I play fantasy it needs to be more hack 'n slash like Skyrim.

[Abraxus]

Polish. People can decry Blizzard all they want, and not personally like [insert thing they make or policy they have here]. But damn, their games are overwhelmingly very, very clean experiences, with tons of detail tossed in everywhere that you might miss the first 1,000 times you walk through an area. Be it WoW, Starcraft, Overwatch, what have you, their games are smooth and clean and people can and do dive into them en masse on day one (and no, crashing because too many people are logging on at once is not a polish issue in the least).

 

That's what Blizzard has traditionally done better than most other studios. Their games are, by and large, whether you like the style or no, polished as ****.

 

Even dropping to their current 1.65 million active population numbers, that still makes them... *checks worldwide MMO population numbers*... oh yeah, still the most populated MMO on the planet. Followed by Old School Runescape at 1.55 million, FFXIV with 1.4 million, then it plummets all the way down to 335,000 with ESO. Those are the top four MMORPG active populations at the moment, and the falloff is tremendous from that point on. And checking the population number curves in MMOs in general? Oh, right, yes. Almost every MMO has been seeing a similar decline in populations at the same rate as WoW. MMORPGs in general simply aren't pulling in the numbers or garnering the same interest they once did in their heyday.

 

So yeah. Love it or hate it or utterly apathetic about it, WoW is still the most popular MMO in the world, one of only three that breaks 1 million active numbers with nothing else going above 350K beyond those top three. That says a lot.

 

And I do believe it comes from their consistent levels of polish few other companies achieve. What does WoW do better than CoX? Polish. By quite a significant amount, at that. Can you imagine if CoX--while keeping its own special feel--had the game world's look itself was as polished as WoW or Overwatch or other Blizzard Games? I mean without giving it WoW's cartoony look, either. Keep the gritty city feel, where people are literally being abducted for body parts on the streets by techno-zombies, cops are getting punched out by punk death cultists wearing skull masks who are asking them with each punch if they're getting the message yet that this ain't the cop's turf no more, and so on.

 

That's what WoW does better.

 

I don't think anyone disagrees that WoW is graphically superior, or that it has always enjoyed a much larger subscription base.  However, I think it's been pretty well established that what people love about this game is not it's graphical presentation.  So, while that level of polish would be great, it just isn't in the cards (and probably never was).  But, now with the age of the engine, and the advances in video card tech in the years since it's been gone, most folks can run all the graphics settings to "11", still have a decent frame-rate, and it looks good enough. 

 

You also commented about the details in their world.  Well, there are a lot of details here too, that a lot of folks just tend to run through so fast that they miss a lot of it.  They don't hit one over the head with the Lore, but it's out there to find and explore if you want to do so.  Like everything here, it's a choice to do, or not.  There might not be the same level of detail, but again, it's appeal is not strictly in the settings, maps, or tiles.  IMHO, it's because this allows one to feel like a newborn super hero, that gets stronger as they progress, until they are practically gods at the end.  Isn't that what a super hero game should allow one to do?  I believe it is, and this game does that very well.  Just like any MMO, there will always be the mundane, less fun things to do on the way to those halls of ultimate power.  But, all in all, it's an experience that most fans of the DC and Marvel stuff can really appreciate.  It plays well to their fandom.  It just suffers from having been published by a company (NCSoft) who never really understood the genre, and really didn't know how to market it as well as it should have been, considering it was around for the beginnings of the MCU, and went offline the same year as the first Avengers movie came out!  That should have marked the announcement of CoH2, not the closure of CoH!  The Devs in the US understood, and did their best, but without the backing of the folks back in South Korea, there was only so much they could do.

 

As for the large player base of WoW, well let's face it.  They started off with a huge advantage of years, and years of content before the game came out, and that carried over.  CoH had to generate it's lore from scratch, which I think they did a pretty good job with, but that kind of thing is hard to sell to the masses that already felt quite at home in the WoW.

 

I believe that the only real comparisons that can be made with CoH, are other games in the same genre (CO, DCUO, etc.).  In those arenas, the others are again superior in the graphical representation, but I think the majority of folks here would agree that CoH is a better game in most respects. Having played both, I know I do!

 

Don't get me wrong.  I think there is plenty of room in the gaming world for both.  But, I don't feel these WoW comparisons are really "apples to apples".

[PaxArcana]

Because, you can be a fan of WoW and CoH. That's allowed.

It's certainly possible to be a fan of both games but also believe one game did something better than the other. Nothing wrong with comparing strengths.

^^^^ Absolutely this, hardcore.

 

What I think CoH did better than WoW:

• Solo-friendly, and yet, still encouraging teams;
  
• Instanced missions;
  
• Community (it was never even nearly as toxic as the WoW forums often get);
  
• Character customization
  
• Not being a loot-whoring gear-and-equipment driven experience
  

 

What I think WoW did better than CoH:

• Marketing;
  
• Engaging story (note, I said engaging, not better-written - WoW does a better job of making your care about the story than CoX ever did);
  
• Marketing
  
• Interesting, unique locations
  
• Marketing
  
• The world / overmap
  

 

:)  I liked, and even subscribed to, both games at the same time.

 

If I could go back to WoW no later than Mists or Cataclysm, I would be there in a heartbeat.  Warlords dealt mylove of WoW a mortal blow, and Legion drove the final nail in the coffin.  :'(