Well, what else would you expect from a long-time P&P guy in his first foray into DM’ing a computer game? 
Regardless of the system they use at the core, I’d like to see a few changes made from CoX.
I hate that, at level 60, I have to worry about gangs of roving Lab Technicians, fer cryin’ out loud. Make me feel as though I’ve increased in power as I leveled up. That means that, in the beginning, I’m fighting thugs… but in the end-game, I’m beating up Doctor Destroyer.
If I see a single “Defeat X number of random bad guys” mission, my eyes will spontaneously bleed with such force that my monitor will be cracked in half. I want to feel as though I’m in a comic book, not as if I’m filling in a spreadsheet.
I want to be able to turn off all those damn auras. Seriously, whenever I got a character up to about level 50 or so, I had so many active powers with attendant glows that I started to suffer serious eyestrain.
CoX goes up to 60 now? Do I need to unretire my 50? I’ve been away for too long!
No. I think either Castle or Positron indicated that they have no current plans to raise the cap.
Oh, and welcome back.
Actually, while those Lab Technicians are tougher than they need to be, this is one thing CoH got right. I’ve been playing Lord of the Rings Online. It seems that at no matter what level, you are facing the same thing over and over and over. In CoH, you can outlevel some foes. You get the feeling of accomplishment when you graduate to fighting Tsoo, and then another feeling of accomplishment when the Tsoo are no longer a threat.
Crey Industries : Now Hiring
We’re looking for a few good lab techs. Must have a bachelor’s degree in biology, and fifteen million hit points, and the ability to punch through a dump truck.
I have an admiration of Crey and their diversity hiring initiatives.
CoH was impossible. It was the first game from a new studio. When it was announced, there had never been a successful superhero game of any complexity. (X-Men arcade is essentially a side-scroller, and Superhero League of Hoboken wasn’t that complex. Freedom Force came out after CoH was in deep design phase)
Even a year later, there was nothing even close to CoH from a sheer freedom of movement and exploration perspective.
Even now, there’s nothing that can come close to showing the variety it has in it.
The fact that it didn’t suck horribly and implode, that’s a miracle. That a lot of things were overlooked on a basic design level… not so much a surprise.
Lute, you’re being obnoxious. It may have been obvious to you, but to insist that it should have been obvious to everyone is narrow-minded. It was not obvious to me, and I DID read the manual, and have been playing RPGs (and getting deep into the rules) for more than 20 years.
I don’t have high hopes for Champions Online. I see good things in the list of features – designing your own nemesis sounds like fun, and building in power effects customization is something CoH should have done already. But going to more action-oriented (no auto-attacks or recharge timers) sounds to me like twitch gaming, which I enjoy less and less as the years pile up.
Jack Emmert’s apparent inability to cope with alternative visions for how to play “his” game is another factor. Maybe he’s learned, but I don’t know what he would have learned from, and I haven’t seen any evidence of it – although I haven’t been looking, so it may have simply escaped me.
And the Champions universe sucks donkey balls. I don’t know if it was the terrible art or the lame derivative characters, but I have always hated the Champions universe. Sorry, Foxbat fans.
I’ve rarely liked the Champions themselves, but the universe characters reached levels of awesome.
The art in all the Hero books has gotten really, really, really crappy. Ever since their financial troubles a few years back, it’s just absolutely awful.
Which is rather sad, because the art after the release of 5th edition was quite good. I hadn’t realized how much the art affected my interest in the books or setting, until I picked up some of the recent releases. Ugh. Even if the ideas and characters were interesting, the visual depiction killed my interest.
Maybe so but what else could have been done? Leave the mechanics alone at let the game stagnate? Tell those who did follow the manual’s suggestion they’d have to follow the min/maxers?
How does someone else’s min/max game affect your play? MMORGs aren’t competitive - or at least, I’ve never played them competitively. If the game was designed to be played by those choosing to follow the manuals suggestions for ED, then it will still work for those that choose to play the game that way. For those that want to min/max, it also works, its just a different experience.
CoH actually did a lot of things along with ED to make it playable for everyone - being able to set mission difficulty. Scaling missions based on party size. Letting you choose whether you wanted to level slowing going after Blue/Greens or level quickly going after Reds. All of those things allow ME to choose how I want my game to be played. Forced ED takes away my CHOICE.
I already said this earlier in the thread but here it goes again.
If you six slot for damage you’ll be able to breeze through enemies. Your ingenious build of putting the same enhancement in a power six times will give you an advantage. :rolleyes:
Other players will team with you and wonder why SuperJoeBob is doing three times their damage with the same attack. And they’ll hit on the masterful insight that you have discovered. And they will six slot.
Eventually a large portion of players will be six slotting because they can gain levels faster and work less to get the same result.
The Devs want there to be a reasonable level of challenge in the game. So they up the bad guys defense or resistance. Now the people who don’t six slot are at an increased disadvantage. You have to six slot so you can be viable.
If you have to build a certain way to be viable it isn’t a balanced game.
So your technique of cramming damage (or recharge, or whatever) enhancements into your power can destabilize the game. If you can’t see that I don’t know what to say. It had to be done. It’s just something they didn’t realize would be as unbalancing in the original release. They found out they were wrong and made the changes necessary to ensure that it’s a good game for everyone. Sheesh.
And? I don’t get why someone else leveling faster or breezing through enemies impacts your game. You want a challenge, play differently. I don’t see how this destabilizes my game or your game at all. Why does the game need to be balanced?
Because everyone will do it. If you can level in 1/3rd the time almost everyone will do it. It becomes the new normal. Since the devs want you to keep playing they don’t want to give out 50th level characters for a weekend of work. So they make the bad guys harder for you to kill, so even with everyone slotting it still takes the same amount of time to level.
People are lazy by default. They won’t work three times as long when a nice little cheat is right there. The devs have to reset it so the average player still takes X amount of time to level. When the average player six slots you have no room to do anything else. ED *frees *you from the limiting factor of only having six slotted attacks. It lets you buy other stuff like KB boosts, END reducers or ACC buffs.
And? If everyone does it and they are enjoying the game, what is the problem?
I posted at length above what the problems are. If you aren’t going to even address my points I’m done talking to you about them. Hate CoX, it’s your prerogative after all.
Actually, I don’t hate it. I actually enjoy the game. I didn’t enjoy Jack Emmertt’s attitude and threw a little party when he left - which is sort of the point of this thread, not excited about Champions because of who is associated with it. And the point I’m trying to make is that the problems so obvious to you were not even problems to many CoX players - they were features - part of what made the game enjoyable. CoX subscriptions dropped after ED - they had less customers - not a great business decision.