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City of Heroes Purchased By NCsoft
Rock, Paper, Shotgun comments on the big news from late last night: NCsoft has announced that it has purchased City of Heroes/Villains from Cryptic Studios, the Massive game's original developer. Everyone on the team has been offered a new position with the newly formed NCsoft NorCal studio, and many of them have accepted. As far as the players are concerned, NCsoft only intends for them to see freebies as a result of this deal: "Now back to you, the players. You are the lifeblood of our game. In celebration of our new studio and our exciting plans, and in order to thank you for the fantastic community that you have built, we are pleased to announce the following: All players with City of Heroes retail accounts will now have access to City of Villains, and all City of Villains retail accounts will now have access to City of Heroes. Players that didn't previously have access to "the other side" will find that they do now. Just log in to check it out! After the launch of Issue 11: A Stitch in Time this Fall, we are removing Debt from all characters and giving you a fresh start ... Also after the launch of Issue 11, all Supergroups will receive an additional 20,000 Prestige per Supergroup member."
The best parts of both games was making your character, once you got past that it quickly turns into go into building kill 100 blue shirted guys, level, go into another building kill 100 purple shirted guys and level....
Chalk this up to stupidity but I always assumed it was NCSoft for both because of adverts from NCSoft portraying the two together.
I've had a CoV account a while back and stopped playing... I may have to start again if all this is more than a rumor.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I have no experience with either, but allowing access to both cities is a great move. Forgiving debts, giving away points, etc not so much. Smart players will exploit this and just run up debts. Dumb players won't, either because of misplaced ethics or because they don't know how to read.
Maybe it's not the same, but in the games I play online, I hate to see this kind of virtual pandering.
Bought my mac in January and dumped this game and moved to WoW. Theres a reason why WoW has a couple million players and these guys don't... it's because you can play Wow on ALL platforms due to them supporting openGL and not DirectX. More game developers should start learning that open game development especially now that VISTA has bombed is in their best interest; other OS sales numbers are not going down and we are just going to dump your game when we switch.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
To be exact, all but one member of the dev team are moving to NCSoft
I've got to say that I'm kind of worried. One of the best things about CoH is that the developers seem to focus a lot on what the players want. There have been several instances of major changes being brought to the game simply on player request, and it's greatly appreciated. I'll be kind of upset if NCSoft abandons this policy in favor of their plan to "aggressively develop and expand the franchise."
Gamertag: WyleType
Debt was already capped, so you're not getting that much. Plus for everyone who was at level 50, debt had no effect whatsoever, so, you know, why bother?
And running an xp debt on purpose is a bad idea anyway.
1. It means running up a lot of death, which means a lot of running back to your corpse instead of doing quests and killing NPCs. Plus, it's demoralizing for most people. It's associated with a failure, no matter how minor.
2. Until NCSoft forgives it, you'll get half xp, as the other half goes to paying back the debt.
Planning to faceplant lots just so NCSoft will forgive it, umm, sounds like just about the dumbest thing one could do. You could just finish the quest the old fashioned way in that time, and get more xp in the process.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I would never have thought that is what they were talking about. Thanks everyone.
Still, not sure how that would really help anyone. Bad players will likely still be bad players.
They forced through a HUGE MASSIVE nerf to EVERYONE that completely ruined the game, despite massive protests and tons of players quitting. And they had the nerve to try to pretend it was for "diversification" only to later admit it was just a nerf. That is not listening to players. Statesman always did whatever he wanted and the players could go fuck themselves.
I mean, was it just that NCSoft offered unrefuseably large piles of cash?
I met & interviewed Jack Emmert at E3 the year before CoH released - if there's anyone who was developing a game as a labor of love, it was him. He was almost a caricature of the Simpsons' comic book guy, but it was in a charming way because he was so genuine. I agree with his characterization of comic books as 'modern day mythology' and while I can't quite yet personally consider them quite 'literature', there are some fantastic stories being told.
It was such a product of his particular personality and desire, I'm curious what it would have taken to get him to relinquish creative control.
-Styopa
Yes, yes, I know nitpicking at the details is a national sport on Slashdot, but take a pause and think about it a bit. You get to run back to the mission, if you want to continue it, and to roughly where you were when you faceplanted. Because, you know, you have to continue from there. Same thing, whether there's a corpse on the ground or not.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I really hope this helps expand the audience for this game in some manner. It deserves more exposure in my opinion. I have always thought of this as one of the best designed games I have ever seen. Cryptic just seemed to do everything right for the most part. The game has always represented top quality design and development for me.
Sure, its a niche market, its not for everyone, and its got a narrow focus. I admit its limits. But in my opinion no other MMORPG out there (past or present) can hold a candle to COH/COV for the quality of the group combat experience. I am part of a group of folks who regularly revisit the game for months at a time, and its usually because we are unable to find the same addictive high quality group combat experience in other games. The next great hope is Pirates of the Burning Sea, which has some great potential,
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Heh. The debt badges don't work that way. They don't count debt incurred, they count debt repaid. So if you were after that badge, heh, being forgiven of 300-500k xp in one fell swoop is going to just move you a bit further away from the badge. Now you'll have to go faceplant a few times to get that badge back.
So, hmm, nope, I still don't see that as too abusable.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
My "supergroup" and I left CoH a long time ago. Why?
... AND we were still having a blast!
... from level 1 to 50 were all suddenly useless. All the planning and effort to tweak builds, respec builds and come out with something of 'heroic' proportions were deemed 'too powerful' and the system was changed to what we were told was "How the devs originally wanted it" .... only a year and a half after the initial release. We didn't even get a thanks for beta testing for them (oh, and paying for it too).
Because we no longer felt heroic. We had run every taskforce (Including the first from that portal realm - 11 HOUR MARATHON), done everything - we knew the game, constantly created new characters
The characters we had planned out
Suddenly, we were no longer in the "City of Heroes" - we were in the "City of Mediocrity" as the devs continued to tune down the classes so no one could feel like an epic hero anymore.
Which really defeats the purpose of the game.
The 'Crisis of Infinite Nerfs' was years ago. I was upset too -- quit the game for two years. Came back this summer after I heard that 1.) The nerfs were mitigated with the new invention system (which apparently was always the plan, they just didn't think to release the two at the same time), and 2.) Statesman was no longer with the game.
That's right -- Statesman no longer worked with City of Heroes/Villains, and he was no longer driving the game toward the Lineage PvP template that he admired so much. Positron was lead developer, and he prefers PvE games and more importantly *heroes*. The devs have spent the last year or two asking the players for what they want and then implementing those requests. The game is much, much improved and well-cared-for now than it was when the global nerfs descended years ago.
And with the latest news, it looks like it's going to remain in good hands. You might want to swing by and give the hero biz another try, see how you like it now.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Actually, it's even funnier. COH and COV are the same game. Whether you have "both" installed, or only one of them, you run the exact same executable, use the exact same resource files, and connect to the exact same servers, and your stuff is saved in the exact same database.
The only difference between COH, COV or both, was your account. If the account says you only paid for COV, then their server will only let you play on the COV side. But, again, you already had both.
And yeah, "both" were published by NCSoft.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yeah, statesman is long gone. But it doesn't matter. Now in order to attempt to compensate for the horrible nerfing, they added new, more powerful enhancements, to try to get it back to some semblance of where it used to be. Only now you have even more tiny inventories you have to worry about filling up, going back to sell crap, etc. And you have to worry about finding/buying the right crap to make the stupid things. This is all annoying crap that was left out in CoH, and that was what made it so good. I don't want to collect shit, and craft shit, and standard MMOG nonsense. I just want to be a superhero, and go kick bad guys asses. The later patches may have made things slightly less shitty than the peak of shittiness, but they are nowhere even close to bringing the game back to where it used to be, much less moving forward and improving it.
On the official forums, the moderators have stated that they're going to tell exactly when the debt eradication will happen, as in a time and date. They have explicitly said that one of the purposes of doing so is specifically so day/night/whatever before, people can do something they're not really used to being able to do because it's a PITA to work off the debt: go out and go nuts.
Want to take on the hardest über-mission that people normally don't work on because they know that they'll spend the next few hours wallowing their way out of debt? Go for it, because tomorrow, you get a free pass.
Also, as has been pointed out, it's not like you can rack up a week's worth of debt in the game. Most of the time, it's paid off within an hour or so at most. Sometimes, I've had it worked completely off by the end of the very mission in which I accrued it. I can't think of a way this can be exploited; at worst, you might be able to save yourself a few hour's effort.
1. Google for the so called "ED" or "Enhancement Diversification".
In a nutshell, the game already been nerfed twice in a row, especially the tanks and a smaller nerf to regen. (Regens had been nerfed in each patch since I1, so we were already used to that.)
And by "nerf" I don't mean the small tweaks you see on WoW. CoH under Statesman had never discovered fine tweaks. The COH kind of balance tweaks were the kind where one class went from God Mode to nobody, and another class was buffed into being God Mode. The game for example started as City Of Blasters (as a devices blaster could make themselves just 5% short of invulnerable to any enemy) and had become City Of Fire Tankers by I4. (Fire tankers were the "squishiest" kind of tank, as damage mitigation went, but even they could solo a mission instanced for 8 people.) That's the kind of massive balance changes that happened in COH.
The last two ones had been rather severe, and this time noone was buffed, it was rather all nerf and no carrot. Still it was accepted among (A) promises from Statesman that this is absolutely the last big change to the game, and (B) people grudgingly realizing that the balance _had_ been crap. So, anyway, the promise from Cryptic was that this is the last big change, the game is finally working as intended, everyone can relax, respec their chars to deal with it, and enjoy the game. Fine.
Then out of nowhere came the "ED". It's hard to explain it to a non-COH-player without explaining all the game system, but let's just say that _everyone_, every single class, lost up to 1/3 of all they could previously do. Fire blasters suddenly did 2/3 of their previous damage, healers could heal 2/3 as well as before, tanks had their armour class reduced to 2/3, etc. It was across the board. Every single power that you could previously enhance to 300% of base value, now went only up to 196% or so of base.
Due to game mechanics as well, for some the effects were more dramatic than it would seem. For example for a tank, going from 80% damage mitigation to 60% damage mitigation means taking twice the damage. The maths isn't exactly linear there.
In some cases, because of former synergies, the losses were even bigger. E.g., a healer that previously relied on permanent hasten, now also had lost that reduction in time between heals, because, well, with the new changes hasten no longer could be made permanent.
Because the change was so uniformly applied across the board, with no regards to who actually needed it, and who was already at the pain limit, some classes lost a lot more than others. E.g., every single class that was based on defense instead of damage reduction, suddenly became useless. Ice tanks and SR scrappers could even be killed by minions. Again, because game maths worked against those. Cryptic took almost a year IIRC to fix defense after that fuck-up.
And best of all was the justification for it. Statesman got that idea from playing a Gameboy game. No, seriously. It wasn't based on some analysis of what actually happens in the game and what players want, it was Statesman playing with his GBA and thinking, "gee, I like it more when fights take longer." Hence, let's nerf everyone to make them take more time to kill an enemy.
Don't get me wrong, it was possible to adapt to the game after the ED. But it did leave a bitter aftertaste in many people's mouths anyway. And for some it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
2. Well, I don't know how to say it nicely, so I might as well not even try: keep the "{{citation needed}}" trolling where it belongs, on Wikipedia.
Now I'm not telling you to believe everything blindly, quite the contrary. But I'm saying to do your own fucking googling. It's not writing a reference for posterity, it's just a fucking message in a thread that will scroll off the main page in a day. Give it a week and noone will even remember that it ever existed. So if you think anyone will spend half a day researching and cross-referencing the bibliography -- by which time, the thread will already be at most visible in that small list on the right -- then I suspect that either you haven't put much thought into it, or some brain damage may be involved.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Where is that WoW native Linux client? Oh yeah, there isn't one.
City of Heroes is built on OpenGL also, go figure. However, the graphics aren't the only thing to a game client does, and the non-graphics part of City of Heroes is built for Windows only. This wasn't a malicious decision, it was a practical one. NCsoft isn't as big as Blizzard, it never has been. Hopefully, as demand for the game grows, they'll be able to go back and capture some of the Mac and Linux markets as well. I'm pushing on NCsoft for this to happen, hopefully we'll get their ear.
For the record, NCsoft does not support City of Heroes on Vista. They say they are working on it, I'm sure they'll get around to it eventually, and by all reports, it mostly works fine on Vista, but it's not like NCsoft are a bunch of Microsoft sycophants.
Going back to the ALL platforms thing again, maybe you overlooked that City of Heroes/Villains is an officially supported Cedega application? You know, just like World of Warcraft?
You're forgetting something about perma-Hasten. (And before I get started: this is coming from someone who never used it, just to be different from the cookie-cutter builds.)
Perma-hasten wasn't an exploit. It was the officially allowed possibility, with Cryptic's blessing.
As the game was launched, you could make Hasten permanent with IIRC 2 SOs. Or maybe 3? I can't really remember. At any rate, you could not only make it "perma", you could have it stack with itself most the time.
Statesman seemed to be genuinely surprised that this was possible. Like many other powers (remember the City Of Blasters smoke grenades for example?) noone at Cryptic had done the maths. What happened with which powers on SOs, was a genuine surprise to them.
So as a sort of compromise, Statesman accepted that, yeah, perma-Hasten is a useful thing and will remain available, but it's only fair to need 6 slots for that. So the maths were changed to produce just that result. Officially, and with Cryptic's blessing. It was _not_ an exploit, any way you want to slice it.
Which just made the sudden U-turn in ED more baffling. They painted some things as evil exploits, that previously they treated as just normal tweaks allowed by the game.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I played City of Heroes for a couple of years, from a few months after initial launch up until shortly after the launch of City of Villains. I experimented with a few alternate characters but I had reached level 45 with my main; 5 levels below the level 50 cap.
I got into the game on the recommendation of my brother and another friend of ours. I played Everquest years earlier for a few months, shortly after the first expansion. The demanding nature of that game, including the reliance on grouping burned me out quickly. What attracted me to CoH was the ability to solo and lack of reliance on gear. It was kind of like a socialist MMO.
What really hooked me was the pace of combat. The game gets really exciting during a fight; I don't think there's been another MMO yet that matches the pace of that game. It's as close to direct, active control as I've seen thus far. Apparently a new powerset is being introduced which even allows for combos.
Additionally, a lone hero could face a group of upwards of 5 foes and emerge victorious, depending on the class. It was fun to jump into the midst of some villains and beat the hell out of them all. So in that regard, it was a very satisfying game.
The pace of leveling was fairly quick but, like all other MMOs it still had considerable grind. And that's really where things broke down. There was nothing else to do but fight. Every single thing in the game revolve around beating up badguys. There were conditions for some missions, like clicking on glowing items, but even then it required getting past hordes of villains. Story was presented in dialog boxes; at the time there were no cutscenes. Alternative skills, comparable to blacksmithing in fantasy MMOs were finally introduced a few months ago. This was after years of promising they were coming soon.
Apparently the skill system was completely redesigned at least 3 times over because it was deemed to not be fun enough. I haven't played what was finally implemented but from what I've read I'm not impressed. It looks like it's merely an adaptation of the supergroup base item building feature.
The character customization is excellent, and probably still surpasses what's available in most other MMOs. Beyond that, however, there's only one way to improve a character. And that's through enhancements which is comparable to stats for other games. Basically, enemies "drop" these enhancements which are then applied to a character's powers. So a player can boost damage, or the power's secondary debuff effect. That was all well and good until the developers decided they didn't want people focusing on a single aspect of any given power. So, every power has 5 slots, if I remember correctly, but using more than two slots for the same boost was essentially a waste. This was supposed to encourage enhancement diversity but I think it resulted in standard ideal templates for specific powers.
There was also the incessant complaining by those who had chosen classes that were less effective solo who felt it was unfair that other classes could solo so effective. Nevermind the fact that the best solo builds weren't always well-suited for groups. So a lot of work went into addressing that with mixed results and to, I feel, the general detriment of the game.
Another problem I came to find with the game was the excessive reliance on templates for environmental design. Basically, upon entering a zone the first time a player had a good sense for how the rest of the zone looked. And many of those features were reused in most other zones. So where other MMOs have a varied and dynamic landscape City of Hero's was a bit contrived. It was tiring running through the same laboratory with a random, nonsensical layout for the 5th time in a few hours. Despite that, the art style was great. It was a lot of fun traveling amongst those skyscrapers. The game simply could have benefited from more variety.
One thing that was good about CoH/CoV was how Cryptic has maintained a close relationship with the players. They've n
I was extremely happy when the system was changed (commonly referred to as "Enhancement Diversification" among the players). Before that happened, the Tank archetypes were invincible. It was common practice to create what were known as "burn" tankers, which were tanks that could absorb an infinite amount of damage without consequence and that would deal out massive amounts of damage with their auras. Other variations on powersets provided similar characteristics.
If you were on a team with a burn tank, your job was to stand back and watch. If you interfered, your team would get angry with you and might even kick you from the team. So that's what most missions were, one or two tanks rounding up and dispatching hundreds of enemies at a time, and six or seven other team members standing around watching. On several teams I joined, the other players wouldn't even bother leaving the mission entrance area. Why bother if you're just going to stand around and watch anyway?
It was power-levelpalozza, and it was extremely tedious and boring.
Nowadays, the developers have gone to great lengths to ensure that every member of the team, no matter what archetype, can contribute. That is a Good Thing(TM).
Unless, of course, you enjoy playing games in "god mode," in which it kind of sucks that there exists the prospect that you might (gasp!) actually get defeated once in a while!
The risk is what makes the game fun and worthwhile. Even Superman is vulnerable to Kryptonite. I guess that makes him no longer the "Man of Steel," but the "Man of Mediocrity." Still, if he were literally invulnerable to everything, as so-called "heroes" were before enhancement diversification, it wouldn't be fun reading four pages of "...aaaaaand he thumps them on the head, so now they're in jail" in every single issue.
I still play CoH mainly because you can play with friends even if some of you or them are below thier effective level dueto Sidekicking. My one biggest complaints about CoH is the fact that they should introduce new powers set more frequently than they have and switch out missions/arcs every now and then.
Bzzt, wrong. Look at some of the early comics, and super-heroes were just that: unassailable gods with perfect morals.
Superman, for example, started with no vulnerability whatsoever. The whole "kryptonite" thing was invented as a tongue-in-cheek explanation when they had to skip an episode or two for the radio version later, for example because the actor was on vacation. And even there it wasn't actually used _in_ any story line. Superman didn't have to battle anyone wielding kryptonite at that point.
Mind you, if you're going to say that that's not (necessarily) much fun in a game, we can even aggree quickly.
But that's a limitation of video games, not a limitation of super-heroes. Literary or comic book characters can be as god-like as the author wants, and still be fun and popular.
Heck, you don't even have to look only at superhero comics. Take Terry Prattchett's Diskworld books, for example. Cohen the barbarian is, for example, so good at dodging that in Interesting Times he even dodges a cannonball from a gun that got teleported right in front of him and fired. Rincewind is comically incompetent except he always ends up on top, even if by sheer luck and without fully realizing what he's done. The witches are just short of god-like in their own right, and can pretty much get what they want even from Death himself. Wossname the monk learned from yetis how to "save and reload" IRL, so he just comes back after being beheaded. Etc, etc, etc. Almost every single major character in those books has some kind of super-power that makes him completely invincible and unstoppable, even by the whole freakin' army of China (or the DW equivalent of it.)
Does that make the books any less fun to read? Nope.
Think action movies. Rambo can stand tall with a machinegun in front of a whole tank division, or get in a pissing... err... shooting contest with a gunship and come out on top. Jedi in SW movies are just about gods that can only kill each other. But they're way out of the league of mortal soldiers or drones, even when those are in brigade-sized formations and with AT-AT and air support. Etc.
And you know what? I dare say that that's actually good character design. People want to be told a nice story where the hero overcomes everything, and everything ends with a happy ending.
Not many people want to be told a tale where the hero thought he could fly circles around the Death Star, but the laws of firepower always beat the rules of literature. Or not many want to be told the story of the guy who thought he could jump in front of the enemy company with a pistol, and was riddled with bullets before he even finished the clip. Those are depressing stories of failure. They're not fun.
We want to be told stories where one determined guy changes the world for the better, and nothing whatsoever can stay in his way. Not one where he fails in the first 15 minutes.
But, again, I can see how that doesn't translate into a fun video game. We just have to accept that it's simply different media, with different rules.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Dude, I've run CoH on Linux using Cedega. There are no "glitches," it runs perfectly well. Like I said, it's officially supported by Cedega, just like World of Warcraft. The only thing that I would consider a glitch is that some of the higher-end graphics rendering functions, such as depth-of-field effects and such, don't work because the video driver that Cedega reports to the app claims to not have those capabilities (even if the card does).
The game not only works, it is actually a lot faster running on Cedega on Linux than on Windows. The time to zone is cut by two or three seconds at least, sometimes a lot more.
And because you obviously missed it the first time, I'll put it in bold letters this time: City of Heroes uses OpenGL to render its graphics. I don't know how much clearer I can make it.
NCsoft plans to install it on Friday and just play like, all weekend.
So glad I don't play this anymore. A part of me was pissed that I bought both versions, now they are just giving the other side away for free. I'd play again if they gave everyone a free month if they already owned COV and COH.
I've been with City of Heroes since open beta 3.5 years ago (just missed the closed beta). I've seen several posts here on /. saying basically "Been to CoH, didn't like it, left the game" and I'd like to say a little about how the game has matured since then.
Today's CoX (so abbreviated since both City of Heroes and City of Villains is really the same game) has changed massively during those 3.5 years. There's City of Villains, 2 years old as of last week, which nearly doubled the number of playable archetypes (think classes). There's tons of new zones (over 30 now) to play in. There's different mission types - rescuing hostages, destroying or defending the urban landscape - than the original "beat up all the bad guys". And there's Inventions, which is the CoX crafting system, a fairly new system that's still growing.
Bad things have happened too. Enhancement Diversification, unfortunately abbreviated ED, upset a lot of people by basically capping the amount by which you could improve your powers. Just over 2 years ago, there was a massive nerf to defense that made melee archetypes much squishier. And plenty of the little nerfs that every MMORPG gets along the way.
One thing that has not changed in the entire 3.5 years is the dedication of the CoX team to the community. The faces have changed - we've had several community representatives, the original lead designers for both CoH and CoV are gone - but the team has continued and has been very open with us about how the game is doing and their plans. Sure, they don't tell us everything, just as I wouldn't tell my clients everything about how I run my consulting business - but they're very open with everything they're allowed to share. And we get new updates (called issues) typically once every 3 months or so, which is great for keeping the game fresh even for us old-timers.
Another thing that continues to grow is the player community. Sites like http://www.paragonwiki.com/, http://www.cohtitan.com/, http://coh.redtomax.com/data/ and http://www.badge-hunter.com/ are continually adding more support for players.
This NCSoft acquisition is a good thing for the game, in my opinion. The developers will no longer have to worry about two masters (Cryptic and NCSoft) - even when both your bosses are in agreement, red tape can cause problems, much less when they don't agree. That issue is gone. NCSoft has shown their commitment to maintaining the game through their offers of employment to practically the entire development and support team, as well as the creation of the NorCal studio. Personally I won't get much out of the in-game gifts, but it says a lot about NCSoft that they're reaching out to the community in this way.
Skip Franklin
It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black. -- despair.com
And did you ever wonder why those modern comics with weak and morally ambiguous heroes only sell a tiny fraction of what comics used to sell? Why now it's regarded as a weird geek hobby, when it used to be entertainment for the masses?
Now I'm not saying that's the only factor, or even the main one, but the fact remains: millions of people were buying every issue of those comics with god-mode heroes. At the very least, it wasn't that major a turn off.
And conversely, switching to dubious heroes that half the time you're not even sure if they're any better than the villains, sure didn't seem to make them much more popular. At best they traded one market segment for another.
Yes, and equally you know from the start that he won't get killed, and he'll have some gadget or ace up the sleeve for any situation. You want it to look like it would be certain death for the average monkey on the street, but your super-hero is super enough to not break a sweat over it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I played COH for several months shortly after it was released. Then I left for a year, and went back for most of a year after COV was released.
At the time, my background was in a semi-serious EQ raid guild. We weren't top tier, but we did a lot for a "family" guild. The guild eventually died of split personality when it tried to change from a family guild into a full raiding guild, and couldn't do either of them well enough to please the 2 halfs.
Burned out from raiding, COH was a terrific change.
In CoH, you get to play a super-hero. The costum design screens were amazing at the time. (they are still good, but at the time the level of customization was unprecedented)
There are 2 major differences between COH and the MMOs like EQ or WOW.
1) In CoH, all of your abilities are intrinsic to your character, with more powers gained as you gain levels, and your existing powers scale in effect as you level. There is no need to get the Magic Sword with +99 strength to make you strong -- just start out being a Super Strength hero and *YOU* are strong
2) In CoH, since you don't need items to make you good, (and there are in fact almost no items), there is no need to display the items on your character, to show off your uberness. Instead, ALL of your characters look is based on your costum and your powers, which means your costum lets you control far more of you characters actual look. In WOW, the character building screen lets you control how your character will look when they are naked but since you always have to have items, there's no point to it.
So unlike EQ or WOW where every lvl 99 character has the same Plate Helmet of Really Cool Dude, and so they all look the same, in CoH, the players actually Look Different from each other.
There is no raid game. Once your character gets to the max level, you really can't "advance" your character.
The hardcore raiders from other games that always want to get their characters ever higher, tend to powerlevel though the game, and then get bored and quit.
The game tends to appeal to a more casual sort of player who enjoys the ride, as you play though the levels. And/or to the sort of player that makes 20 characters and never gets any of them up to high levels.
Currently, I'm playing WoW and not CoH. But I've been thinking of taking a couple of months and going back to CoH. Its fun to go bashing heads in... especially when you get to beat up the 5th column.