[MUD-Dev] CoH

[cruise]

Michael Hartman wrote:

> Honestly, what meaningful choices? I'll take your three examples
> in order.

A lot of these points seem to be reflective of playstyle than
game. I look at and play CoH very differently from you, it
seems. I've been playing since beta, and it's still sucking up way
too much of my time than is healthy.

> Power Selection: At any given level where you choose a power, you
> really do have only 2 or 3 real choices at most. The fact that you
> have a few more choices if you want to do something incredibly
> foolish and detrimental to your character does not mean you've
> added meaningful choice. Furthermore, it is so well known already
> which powers are good and which ones are crap, you usually have 1
> choice, and history has shown us that one candidate does not equal
> a choice.

I'm often finding myself spoilt for choice, and furiously debating
which power to get. But then, I'm less concerned with min/maxing,
prefering to go with what suits my character.

> Enhancements: There is virtually zero choice here. For example,
> every attack power gets 1 accuracy and 5 damage, or 6 damage for
> blasters with targeting drone. That's it. The fact that you CAN
> gimp yourself with exceptionally bad choices (not slotting an
> attack power in this manner) is not a meaningful choice.

I would hardly call myself gimped, and I haven't followed this
pattern in any character yet. Again, I prefer character-appropriate
design over the extra few percent effectiveness. That, for me, is
much more fun.

> Every 5 levels you upgrade from X to X+5. If you take a few extra
> seconds to sell loot in the right shop, you never have to make
> choices as to which things you will upgrade. You'll have plenty of
> money. After level 30, even if you rarely sell loot, you'll have
> plenty of money. You'll almost never use a found enhancement after
> level 15 (if not earlier) because the odds are SLIM it is for your
> origin, slimmer that it is a type you need, and even SLIMMER that
> it is high enough level to be useful. No matter what level mobs
> you are fighting, the level of the drops is affected by your
> character level. That's incredibly silly. There's no reward for
> fighting hard mobs.

Enhancement drops are /supposed/ to be by enemy level and certainly
have been in my experience. If you're seeing anything different,
that's a bug :P

And not getting the enhancments you need is exactly what drives the
trade market, same as any other MMOG. I regularly swap enhancments
with team-mates for our mutual advancement - or failing that, swap
them for influence. Would you prefer that every enhancement you got
was exactly perfect? Trading is one the few things to do outside of
combat - removing that would make it an even "shallower" game.

> As I have noted previously, the system is exceptionally depressing
> because as soon as you upgrade your enhancements (which have the
> same effect as the ones you had at level 1) you now face an
> average 6% decay in potency each time you gain a level. By the 4th
> level of 5 in an upgrade cycle, you are 24% weaker than you were 4
> levels ago. Boy, that's fun- gaining levels to get weaker.

But the game isn't forcing you to live with that drop - you're free
to upgrade your enhancements if you want. Besides, it's no different
from any other MMOG in which you're pretty much required to keep
levelling your equipment. One of the aspects that attracts me to CoH
is the ease of keeping "equipment" up-to-date.  I don't want to
spend hours and hours waiting for the rare-drop of a piece of
equipment, hoping it will be higher than the version I already have
- or spend a fortune camping shops waiting for them to sell the next
bit of equipment I need. I want to tool up, and bring those
criminals to justice, like any superhero.

> Furthermore, enhancements provide absolutely ZERO visual effect or
> cues. Your powers don't look different. The effects do not look
> different. Nothing is different.

Fair enough. though customisable powers are promised for later, so
you can manually make them look different if you choose
to. Personally, this is a complete non-issue for me.

> Tactical Combat: Ok, you've got to tell us how far you've gotten
> into the game. CoH has fast paced combat, but it is definitely not
> tactical. CoH has to be the easiest, least tactical MMORPG I've
> played- and I've played tons. Getting dragons stuck on terrain in
> AC2 required more skill and strategy.

Perhaps, if you min/max totally and fight only blues/greens (as your
comments seem to suggest), then yes, it'll be very easy. Try an
eight-player mission where the mobs are a level or two above you,
however, and you quickly need tactics. I've been in some very tense,
exciting and downright thrilling battles.

> It would not be exaggerating to say that an average 9 year old
> could play this game and play it quite well. The game is designed
> to send your hero against large hordes of very wimpy foes. The
> result of this is that they cannot really hurt you, and you can
> kill them in 1 or 2 hits. This renders debuffs, crowd control,
> aggro management, healing, and many other forms of support or
> other tactics irrelevant. Sure, you can fight harder foes (purple
> cons), but the game punishes you for doing this. Not only are the
> rewards incredibly inferior, but the loot is the same (see above)
> and they have actually made patch changes to dramatically DECREASE
> your ability to fight hard foes.

Which have since been reversed (or at least lessened). I agree the
time/reward for higher level mobs solo is a bit poor, but in teams
it's much better.  Of course there are large numbers of wimpy
foes. That's why they're minions :P The bosses and arch-villans are
definately not. Which is exactly how it should be. Since when did a
superhero have trouble with minions?

> I haven't even gone into the fact that the game excessively
> discourages grouping and doing missions (the closest thing to a
> story in the game). At level 25+, the exp earned in missions is
> 1/10th that of general hunting and the xp in groups is half or
> worse than solo. Obviously there is more to a game than pure xp,
> but CoH has nothing but advancement which begs the question "what
> else is there?" Further more, even if your game has more than
> combat, discouraging grouping and discouraging
> missions/questing/whatever through dramatically diminished rewards
> is bad design.

> At this point you might be asking "Wow. If you hate the game so
> much why did you play it so much." I don't hate the game. It is
> like a cheap but enjoyable pulp novel you read to pass the time on
> a train ride. I run CoH in the background while programming and
> alt-tab into it now and then to mindlessly slaughter a few groups
> of bad guys. This is at level 35+ mind you. It takes no strategy
> or tactics. It takes almost ZERO thought. Every mob is killed the
> same. Every battle is the same. Every piece of loot is nothing
> more than a widget to be sold for money (called influence). But
> the game is pretty and it passes the time while working so I play
> it. The fact that the PC market has been lacking horribly in games
> certainly doesn't hurt either.

Again, I can only disagree, and assume our playstyle is wildly
different.  Pretty much any MMOG currently on the market (at least,
the really big ones) basically requires combat to level. No matter
how many other things there are to do, you're not going to level
often unless you fight.  All CoH has done is stripped all the
unnecessary hinderances to fighting out, so you can get on with the
actual game quicker and easier. Downtime is almost
non-existant. There's no camping rare spawns for hours. Equipment is
easy to find. Mobs and missions are plentiful. Everything is set up
to make it as easy as possible to get out and arrest stuff. That is
the whole point of the game. With that in mind, fighting lower level
mobs while min/maxed and complaining there's nothing to the game is
somewhat of a tautology.

CoH is an excellent example of good UI and focused game
design. Sure, if you don't /like/ the focus, then it won't
appeal. But that's not really the game's fault. SimCity, for a
random example, is I am told, a brilliant game. I can't stand
it. Doesn't make it /not/ a good game, just means that my tastes lie
elsewhere.

--
[ cruise / casual-tempest.net / transference.org ]
   "quantam sufficit"
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