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CoH 10-year anniversary wake/mourning/curse NCSoft thread
sistersilicon
Posts: 1,687 Arc User
Ten years ago to the day, Sister Admin first took to the streets of Paragon City, Pinnacle Server Division. Only to promptly get badnamed for "Admin", and Sister Silicon (and ten years of silicone confusion) was truly born.
...
$#!^, man. How did this all turn out so wrong?
Yinz think Cryptic will do something tomorrow to mark the occasion?
...
$#!^, man. How did this all turn out so wrong?
Yinz think Cryptic will do something tomorrow to mark the occasion?
Choose your enemies carefully, because they will define you / Make them interesting, because in some ways they will mind you
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
Post edited by kaiserin#0958 on
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Let's see.
As for ncsoft, its not that im cool with them, i still wont play any of heir games, even the ones i bought prior to the backstab, but continuing to siege their walls with rage isn't going to fix anything. don't buy their games, that's a fine and reasonable way to handle it, but they aren't listening to you cussing them out anyhow, so just follow the good, likely you made friends there, and some of the devs landed on their feet here(on sto..grumble grumble) so you can still have some of them, but you just go on with the good that came of your time there and don't waste your time with anger or the rest..or any future ncsoft games :P besides, none of us know what the future will bring.
Hey, i had a bookmark!
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
Godtier: Lifetime Subscriber
I don't expect anything, unfortunately, and my work has been so hectic my plan to have a thing was shelved.. i couldn't find the time to plan it right.
That would be a fantastic way to commemorate NCSoft's evil u_u
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
You know I hate your face so hard* but that was truly the forum post of the century.
*just messing :P
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
Probably the original GW. You know, to make room for Wildstar.
Edit: Unrelated, but I hear CCP cancelled their World of Darkness MMO plans.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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What do you mean? A system where you can mind control anyone so long as they're higher generation than you would never run into problems in an online setting, and we surely wouldn't end up with something that cuts 90% of content and only leaves in combat-related abilities.
Also it's not as if Mage: The Ascension would make our freeform system look easy to balance...
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
The Television is showing a popular show where average Americans with delusions of talent attempt to sing pop songs, and then have their performances torn to shreds by music critics. As a final act of gladiatorial sacrifice, they throw their dreams on the mercy of the viewing public, who then vote for which tin-eared fool deserves a doomed contract and a shot at stardom that's almost certain to fail. It's a show about destroying and degrading the all-too human dream of being special and secretly talented, and through that degradation allowing others to feel alright about the failures that are their own mediocre lives. As a villain, you have to concede that it's genius.
so thats where all these "reality" talent shows came from
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What makes me shake my head is when people get mad about CoX fans missing the game. If you played it, you miss it.
Gems like the one I found? That was some of the random humor thrown into the game. NPC's would say some hilarious stuff, and they did it without making an absolute joke of the setting. In comparison, CO and CoX are two guys. CoX tells a good joke and everyone laughs, CO tells a fart joke and makes armpit noises and keeps doing it repeatedly until you acknowledge him, and then repeats the pattern in equally embarrassing ways.
There are the people going, 'well- CoX is dead, CO isn't!' to justify how CO is 'better'. That's like your platoon sergeant stepping on a landmine, then you having to take charge of the patrol- and saying you were a better leader than he was.
Not to mention, if you think CO would get a fraction of what CoX got if it shuts down? You're sadly mistaken. CO will go out with a couple of whimpers and a shrug.
CO has a much, much better character creator. It could benefit from having very like/similar options to CoX, but overall you can do a hell of a lot better with CO's.
And sadly, CO is that- it's a character creator with some gameplay and an RP engine. It's Second Life without the penises everywhere.
With CoX, you didn't have 'FoTM builds'. Not everyone was plowing through the game and rolling max level toons in 3 days. People were working long and hard to have maxed-out characters (and I never got that far). If you were a badass, it wasn't because you cobbled together some clown build. You made the best of your power combos and skill.
And RP? The community was no better or worse than CO's. Except the furries didn't look as stupid, and you either 'put up or shut up' if you wanted to throw down. Oh, and their horrible sick deviants that did horrible sick ERP (You know what I mean) and harass people? Got ran out of the game. Banned. And sadly ended up in CO where the absolute worst offender I've seen in the game has only been banned for 3 months and returned to do the same crap again.
Most of all, playing CoX made you think 'Wow, these guys have one hell of a setting'. These guys liked comics, and made their own 'comic universe' that works really well for a lot of different types of characters. Sadly, CO's them seems to be somewhere between 'vaguely aware of comics being a thing' and 'parody/mockery'.
Nobody gets mad about them missing the game. People get mad at them for constantly talking about it in comparison to this game, with those comparisons always being exaggerated and biased.
Oh look, you gave an example of just that u_u
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
What aspect of the game are you talking about? Because if you're responding to Cyber's rant about the quality of CO's writing and interpretation of the PnP lore, he's got you dead to rights.
CoH's writing operated on a scale with The Dark Knight at one end and Iron Man at the other, depending on how dramatic or witty they wanted to be.
CO's writing scale runs the gamut from Wonder Twins-era SuperFriends to Marvin & Wendy-era SuperFriends. Whether you think the gameplay is fun or not, CO is set in a bad Saturday morning cartoon.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
Uhh, no. CoH writing was decent, but no where near that quality. And CO is actually set on a silver age standard super hero, which was a rather ridiculous era, whether you think so or not.
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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That's why I was specific when I said "interpretation of the PnP lore". The PnP game is Silver Age, the Online game is SuperFriends.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
The difference between the two isn't very vast like comic nerds love to believe.
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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To compare the two games is natural. They're superhero MMORPG's. That's like telling people they can't compare WoW and Allods Online.
The gameplay in CoX was slower. But, for a game that would have been 10 years old now, CoX had leaps and bounds over CO in many ways. CO just looks better and plays faster.
Ever seen the episode of Powerpuff girls where the girls all want to be their own individual superhero, and Buttercup is Spore!, the shadowy exaggerated dark hero? That's CO trying to be 'serious'.
CO is Powerpuff Girls.
If anything, CU is a generic setting that can be tailored by GM to any desired style of play.
Main handbook explicitly gives options for every comic book age, from the Golden Age, through the Silver one, Bronze, Grimdark and to Modern. And even covers things like urban fantasy.
Villains biographies are also split between ages, there are examples of villains tailored for different settings.
If anything, most of them are more like the Bronze Age.
And yes, CO writing and theme are terrible incarnation of said CU*) and I'm suffering it pretty much only because I mildly like gameplay, have friends ingame, and DCUO is meh.
Oh, and CoH/V gameplay was hard to suffer at low levels. So what that you could build for recharge times later? That's not the factor if you can't stand gameplay long enough to reach later levels, lol.
* - quite an achievement, considering that CU also has few letdowns on its own, and is still better.
I seriously think you're exaggerating. Champs does have its bad dialogue from time to time, but seriously, what's Powerpuff Girls about defending the city from an alien invasion, saving the world from an apocalypse, fighting terrorist organizations, street-sweeping gangs... I could go on.
Honestly it's like people go "Hi-Pan can't say Millennium? Whole game sucks!" All the puns and pop culture references in the game get tiresome, but those are usually just mission titles. If the game was all Batman dark-and-serious huffy-puffy all the time, that would get tiresome, too. And I'm sure there's plenty of people that wouldn't appeal to. Not everyone likes Batman, the character or the setting of.
Unless I'm missing something, there's a whole lot of hyperbole going on around here.
What's wrong with Saturday morning cartoons darn it! Lighten up and pour yourselves a bowl of fruit loops.
And this is only because I love you.
Actually, that was pretty much every episode of the Powerpuff Girls.
You can have all of those things above in a game that's not 'Grabass Online'. CO tries to at some point, and then you realize that the original writers were just trolls.
"HERO, save the world from the Apocalypse! We've been betrayed and all the Champions are dead!"
10 minutes later:
"LOL get me a sandwich."
Sorry, that's not good writing. That's throwing random crap out there. And since Vibora Bay was an add-on, you can say it's good- but it was an addition to the other mountain of garbage. I disagree that it's 'good', because it's like CO doesn't know how to be serious unless they're piling corpses in the streets and killing beloved heroes.
No, that's a completely different issue. After I saw that, I was half expecting to see a villain in blackface saying 'Lawdy Jeeyzus they be a monstah attackin' dis city, Bawss! Hap me lawd!"
No on has to be 'serious dark and huffy all the time'. CoX had humor, and a lot of it- and it was appreciated, but it knew how to work that in.
That's the problem with a lot of the CO fanboys- they don't realize that when people say 'CO's writing sucks', that there's plenty of other things it could be. No one's asking for Nolan's Batman, murder in the street, make it dark all the time. This is a straw man argument, and if you believe that these are the only two settings a superhero game can have, you should probably go look at some actual comic books that weren't written during an era where they were restricted and neutered to keep boys from being homosexuals.
Here's the embarassing part- while I don't prefer Champions' lore, it's tolerable. I could make do. The sad thing is the lore is right there, and CO is so intent on pop culture and grabass that it can't even get Multifaria right. Well, maybe that's because someone saw CoX do Praetoria and then decided he wanted to be buttmad and 'do it better'. And anything other than the tailor, if CO tries to 'do it better', it just ends up an embarassment.
Dude, face the facts: Nearly ever single aspect of CO is blatant knock-off of something else. There's no way around that fact. It is an unoriginal, poorly written excuse for comics setting. CoX came off as some writers that liked comics and wanted to create their own universe. CO comes off like a bunch of guys who are vaguely aware of what comic book superheroes are and have decided to make a parody of it. You can partially blame that on CO's original developers having a pissing contest with CoX.
I'd like to see some examples of how CoH storylines were so amazing. I'd also like to see ways that the storylines in Champions could be made to "not suck" by the people who claim they do.
Champions, for the most part, has standard MMO fare writing. I'll admit I didn't make it all the way to end game in CoH; I could only stand to get to level 20 or so before getting bored out of my skull, but from the time I did spend there, it was nothing more than "Go make me a sandwich."
There's nothing wrong with a light tone to comics. It doesn't automatically make it Powerpuff Girls. That's a weak argument to lean on for support.
Also, ironically, you back up your straw man claim with another straw man. I read plenty of comics, I just prefer those of the Silver Age.
Seriously? Not hyperbole?
Are you saying that nearly every single aspect of CoH is completely original?
I'd ask you to back this up with examples of nearly every single aspect of Champions being a knockoff but that's a tall order. Thanks for the laugh though.
All generic superhero universes in games are pretty much Marvel/DC with tags removed.
Actually, the penises are everywhere, except they're only described in profiles rather than shown visually. I even saw a Nazi penis once in game. Boy, I should have taken a screenshot of that character and its profile, it was glorious!
SL is uninhabitable unless you stay in private or unpopulated regions, and if you do that, the only activity available is chat, unless you have both coding and modeling skills. Even then, the last time that I was in there, the performance was so bad that I couldn't really do anything.
Also I will admit its hard not to look at city without those rose colored glasses, If a game tried to do the 60$ box every 3 months AND 15$ a month and pay for costume packs like city did right up to the last year they would be laughed off the shelves. It was a 8 year old game some of the graphic were dated, it crashed a lot, the devs sometimes did moves that made us players wonder what they were smoking. but people still liked it.
I actually had a friend give me the if "COX was GOOD it would still be around" and also "if you like COX so much why are you here" made me want to smack him so hard. its really a mean thing to say. Because yes COX isn't around, Yes CO is around... but it was not closed due to relative quality or popularity and im sorry but we cant exactly go back to a game that isn't around. And I really really hope CO is never closed in the manner COX was. I would not wish that pain on anyone.
CO and COX are the same genre but very different styles. CO was made 5 years later and based on what was popular at the time.(cell shading was HUGE). just like NW had the misfortune of being created while 4th ed d&d was all the rage. It would be NICE if I dint have to tell my friends stick with it for a few weeks you eyes will get used to the graphics and walk them through how to turn off outlining. but what can you do it was a style choice.
if we have to deal with family...er I mean the purple gang in CO. and a few over the top overlords surely city didn't have any over the top hamtastic supervillians with over obvious names *hides nemesis behind a curtain* ignore the steam coming from behind the curtain! and yeah city didn't resort to bad puns and bad racial stereo types *quickly shoves the Tsoo and mooks under the bed*
ok all sarcasm aside city and champions are very similar and that why comparing them either positively or negatively results is such drastic holy wars. its not like they are apples and oranges they are like green apples vs red apples. The big difference is people are comparing city after 8 years to CO after 3-5. about this time in COX COV was just coming out...crafting was new. Pvp was still good. also keep in mind city entered its golden age right when CO came out. Maybe CO will enter its golden age when COT makes its appearance.
tldr= I like both games darn it, Let me miss my old game and enjoy my new game! and give us foundry/sg bases
Okay, I suppose you have a point. Still, the Nazi futa "superhero" I saw in Monster Island was gut-splitting hilarious.
More serious manner, it can be done. I made that clear.
However, CO does it in only a barely more serious manner. It's still slapstick cartoon grabass.
Use Google. The stuff is still out there. You'll see. Oh, and the quests made sense- they followed a plot. Was in Shakespeare? No, but it wasn't a series of random tasks like CO's slapstick silliness.
You -do- realize that there was a lot of talk when CO first showed up, that it was a childish jab at CoX, right?
Step 1: Hire actual writers.
Step 2: Stop pop culture reference.
Step 3: Stop making grabass.
Step 4: Add plot.
Standard fare writing? WoW trumps it, and it's dumb as hell in most parts. I hope you're not comparing it to TSW, STO, SWTOR, Lineage, Everquest, or... well, any other MMORPG. Yes, they all have some mildly silly elements, but CO is blatant cartoon parody nonsense with no cohesion at all between one fetch quest and the next.
There's a difference in your claim and my claim:
I played it more than you. You stuck with CO. I play CO, too. I have more of an experience with the game than you. Yes, some missions were repetitive. But just as much as you think people are exaggerating CoX? I think you're underselling it to justify CO.
Hang on, let me tell you how you can make a comparison:
If CoX was 'not as good as CO' and 'exaggerated', then why was it twice as old as CO and pulling in more players, putting out more content, and seriously crushing CO financially?
Let me also remind you that CO's management is partially to blame. When CO came out, CoX stepped up its game. CO had a chance to pull in a lot of players when CoX shut down, and they went into damned near developer hibernation.
And let me ask you this: If Paragon reassembled- and used the very same engine and technology CO did- nothing newer at all- and made City of Heroes 2... do you think CO would honestly stand a chance?
Additionally, up until the day the game shut down- there was content. Developers were in touch with the players- some actually even roleplayed signature characters with the players. CO can't even take feedback from the PTS until recently.
You're right, there's nothing wrong with a lighter tone. Except that it stops appealing to most people at around 13 or 14 when kids' cartoons don't hold their attention and they need something with actual thought put into it.
I'm sorry, usually when I meet people who 'prefer' Silver Age comics, that person just needs to be introduced into something else. Like other comics.
/me jabs.
Otherwise, that wasn't meant for you. That was for others.
Oh, and you don't want to hear why I think the community is partially to blame for CoX players giving CO the middle finger.
Aside from a few places, I'm not seeing all this slapstick cartoon business you talk about. Mission names? Yes. In the actual content? Where?
Strange, I've never seen any gaming communities try to put down competitors' games.
I meant actual examples, not "go look it up." Sadly this doesn't turn up much of anything.
Underselling it? No. I give you full disclosure of how much I played it, and what my experiences were. I don't have any memorable storylines from City in my head. I'm giving you what I remember, and what my opinion was.
Also to be clear, I did play a lot of different characters, not just a single one up to 20-something, for whatever that's all worth.
Moving on, my only "claim" is that you're exaggerating how bad Champs is. Now, before you rebut, I don't think the writing in Champions is amazing, and I'm not putting it up on a pedestal. I'm not trying to justify anything. Very early on, I myself posted on here about having had enough of the puns and pop culture references - to the point where I went on the wiki and made a list of all the missions in the game, to try and find out how many were and how many weren't puns or pop.
I don't make excuses for the game, or the decisions of the developers (you and I share similar views on that topic). If I was trying to justify the game's writing, I'd be telling you it was stellar. But no, I'm just saying that I don't think it's as bad as you make it out to be.
Are we still talking about just writing, or the entire game as a whole?
First, 'not as good as Champions' is an opinion. It happens to be my personal opinion, but I don't even know why you brought that up, because I didn't.
Do we know the actual number of players that it was "pulling in" compared to Champions? Or was there a decay there as well, but just starting from a larger pool of players? I won't pretend to know what the population of City servers looked like, and I do know we've had lots of declines, but not knowing any of the actual facts, I can't answer the question.
Putting out more content, yep, this I can totally agree on. Something I can actually measure.
Crushing Champions financially? Do we know this? I know there's lots of rumors around about how amazing the game was doing (so good that it had to go free-to-play, just like Champs?), but you and I both don't know how much either of these games made. News flash, City got shut down. You can blame NCSoft all you want til you're blue in the face, but you don't know if they shut it down because they weren't making money, or if it was some move to keep Guild Wars running, whatever.
The only facts I know is that Champions is still running (Powerpuff Girls notwithstanding) and for all the creative and storytelling might of City, it is not.
So with all that in mind, I can't answer your question about which game is (was) better. I also can't tell you how big the universe is or what Uranus smells like, but I can tell you that Earth has 100% more human population than the moon.
To blame for the writing? We're not just talking about the writing anymore. Okay.
Cryptic missed a golden opportunity when City shut down. I'll be the first to admit to that. A double XP weekend was literally, the least they could do, right above total inaction. Why did you bring this up?
My crystal ball is in the shop. Would it do better than Champions? Yes. Would it do better than Champions? No. Both reasonable answers since we can't tell the future.
Define "recently." If you mean "since Cryptic North," then I agree with you.
Sticks and stones. Call me a 13 year old all you want. I'm inclined to agree.
I honestly don't care.
But then I love CO and COH for different reasons. I was never one of those pick either or I always played both and liked them both for different things. I like CO for its faster pace free form and awesome cc.
I liked COH for its dev support, atmosphere and some of its story arcs and for its vision they had a plan they were going places you felt confident in the game plus the CC was also good not up to CO standards but good plus I am one of few it seems who really enjoyed the story creation thing.
As for SL and the penis thing well SL is a lot like RL unless you know where to go you often end up wandering into a vision of hell. It ain't all like that.
anyways no hate towards the CO community off me far from it. We are the same. The forums here are just more negative due to frustration and lack of faith in Cryptic/pwe and probably now a bit of fear if we don't watch it we could be going the same way. Its a little bit unnerving when one of the best comments about CO in recent times was in the kickstarter for something else.
It starts at the login screen and continues from there.
Grond.
And CoX players, a small number, launched a massive smear campaign against CO a while back.
I don't have enough room. Off the top of my head? Praetoria. Excellent writing, the whole section. Anything with the devoured Earth. I never got to Dark Astoria but I heard it was good.
We're here, and I'll say this- this is the thing with me. If you oversaturate anything with a particular theme, it gets to be too much for me. If half of a detective show is bad jokes and corny pop culture references and cartoonish action, you can't sell it to me as a detective drama.
I don't know exact numbers- and I'm pretty sure it's hidden for a reason. But I can tell you that it was enough people to dwarf CO's. Just a cursory look through most of the instances, the numbers we have most of the time? Couldn't hold a candle to CoX's population. If CO had the same separate server system that CoX had, we'd have maybe two servers at best.
Free-to-play isn't really a 'oh man, we're not making money' move by developers/producers. It's actually becoming a smarter move. A lot of future MMORPG's will have this model, perhaps you buy the box and then micro transactions for additional content. It's not a downgrade, it's an alternate business model that more and more or leaning toward. I used to think the same thing, but if you look at the figures and logic behind it, it makes sense. Subscriptions are going to eventually be a thing of the past.
Again, I illustrate this:
Sam's Burger Shack competes with Earl's Burger Shack. Sam's is closed down by its corporate office that owns 10 other eateries. Earl's is still there, and its corporate office owns two other eateries. The amount of money those places made compared side-by-side is irrelevant, it was a corporate decision with a lot of other factors at play. It doesn't mean Earl's was more successful, it meant Sam's corporate office axed them because they found a way to get money on something else that probably had nothing to do with Earl's quality or lack thereof.
If Atari had refused to sell CO, CO would have met the same exact fate well before. But that was NCSoft with CoX. Had nothing to do with being 'better', it was corporate heads making some decisions that we aren't privy to- and they've made that clear.
These are the only facts we know, though.
And if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go finish lettering my comic book (that you should probably stay far, far away from :biggrin:).
Just be sure you don't depict divorce, cleavage, understandable villains, death, altered gender roles, Socialism, or anything else. It might make me a gay delinquent.
Good, let's hope someone talented takes it.
Or are you applying the flawed 'If you think you can do better, go do it?'
Because I can look at Tara Reid topless and say she's got broken boobs. I don't have to prove I can do better, or even be capable of doing so to say something sucks. I'm not going to plastic surgeon's school.
Bubbles is pretty hardcore. Defender only wishes he could be so badass.
When I think of cartoons, I think of Biker Mice from Mars and Sonic SatAM. I liked those shows. They have characters I liked. CO has zero characters I like. The only one with potential is the UNTIL carrier woman who doesn't even have a name or story. At least she's not a penetration joke or only known for a dialog bug.
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
No, what gets my goat is that group of former CoX players who seem to exist only to badmouth CO in every particular, as if it needs to be punished for daring to continue to exist while their own beloved CoX was lost. We get it. You miss the old game. So go buy a tabletop ruleset for superheroing (I hear there's a nice flexible one from this place called Hero Games, or if you prefer you can try GURPS Supers), and rebuild Paragon City for yourselves. But please, for the love of Statesman, quit logging into CO for the specific purpose of trying to drive away the existing playerbase. CO's continuation isn't a manifestation of evil, it's just better supported by its publisher than CoX was. Life's like that sometimes.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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*Throws a handful of Cap'n Crunch on the fire.*
I think you have this confused with the Amazing Spider-Man 2 review thread.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
Oh, don't you worry, I don't feel forced to throw "hot topics" in my comics just to appeal to the "edgy" crowd.
Actually I'm pretty sure he was making reference for so-called cause of "common decency" that spawned the Comics Code Authority.