NCSoft just announced that City of Heroes will be shutting down its servers by the end of the year. There has been no explanation as to why, and it came completely out of the blue despite the game still seeming to be healthy.

Many people have found this both shocking and baffling.

Just wanted to post that up here.

First off, it was a pretty fair and balanced review that covers the majority of the good and bad points of the game. Even though I’m a 6+year veteran I’m not going to say the game is flawless.

There are, however, a few things that need to be mentioned.

First: Your mention of the Help channel was brief, and didn’t mention that Help actually reaches more players than Broadcast does. Broadcast is limited to players in the same zone as you, while Help reaches players on the entire server, regardless of where they are or whether they are a hero or villain. As a result of this, many veterans (who have access to global channels) choose to use Help quite frequently, and if you ask a question there is usually a veteran or two paying attention to the channel that can answer it for you (if you play on Pinnacle one of them is frequently me) Help also has no limit on how many people can use it, while the player created global channels does have an upper limit. When the hybrid model was first released, a fair number of players were upset that the Help channel was being used as a de facto Broadcast by new players, but they have since relaxed.

Second: The amount of money required to really open up the game for you is small. Less than the cost of buying a console game, and easily providing more entertainment for the money spent. Reward tokens are earned by spending money on the game or by time you have subscribed. Tier 3 opens up pretty much all the chat channels and allows you to send tells. You will reach tier 2 for $5 spent (the first purchase gives you a reward token, regardless of the amount), and you will reach tier 3 for an additional $15 (it does not have to be all at once). The single most game changing thing you can purchase in the market is an Invention license. That will cost you an amount of points that equals about $2 for a 30 day license. So, if you don’t care about the other stuff in the market, you can unlock all the chat options and have access to Inventions for a year or more. All for $20, which is well worth it if you like the game enough to want to play it regularly.

Third: The slow pace that was mentioned several times. As other people noted, as you get higher in level you get more powers to use, which gives you something to do at any point you can imagine. At level 50 you will find that you have acquired more powers than you can feasibly use in one fight, and many players take powers that they have no intention of ever using, just because they have to take SOMETHING at that level. Intelligent use of your enhancements plays a role as well. Using just SOs (the best you will get without paying anything) you can cut the recharge time of a power roughly in half. Doing so will result in lower values for other attributes though, so you have the choice of getting the power back faster, having it deal more damage, costing less endurance, or being more accurate. Or you can combine the types of enhancements you have slotted and have a little bit of all of them. It does not appear that you got to a sufficient level to use Single Origin enhancements in your review. Things get much better once you can use them at level 22.

Fourth: PvP. PvP, in spite of the changes a couple years back that virtually gutted it, is still quite fast-paced and takes full advantage of the fact that you can go UP as well as moving along the ground. That said, there is a steep learning curve and you will have to learn how your powers work in PvP as opposed to PvE. There’s also the high probability that a new player will be VERY frustrated when attempting to fight a veteran PvPer, due to difference in skill level, and the fact that the veteran will most likely have a lot of Invention Sets slotted, which will push their performance well beyond what a new player will be capable of. That said, it’s fun to mess around with with your friends, but it’s not a big selling point of the game. The game was not originally designed with PvP in mind, so it was quite a surprise how broken some things were when it was introduced.

Fifth: You mentioned not being able to speak on class roles at higher levels. Basically, Tankers tank, Defenders defend, and Blasters blast. It doesn’t change much as you level. One of the nicer things about the game is that the “Holy Trinity” of Tank/Healer/DPS is NEVER required to succeed in anything in the game. The way the class roles are set up, and the overlap between them, means that while everyone can be useful on a team, no one is strictly required. In fact, one of the most powerful team combinations you can have at higher levels is a team of 8 Defenders. That would be the fantasy MMO equivalent of entering a dungeon with a group of nothing but healers. It’s powerful because a team of 8 Defenders can buff each other into gods and/or debuff enemies into kittens. And even a Defender’s lower damage is respectable enough, and gets damn powerful when you add debuffs into the mix.

And last: Your review mentioned it being fairly lonely in the game. The time of day in which you play has a lot to do with that. The average age of CoH players skews a little older than some games, so the game starts getting more active in the late afternoon and early evening most days, coinciding with when people have free time after work and school. The population has been estimated (fairly accurately I’d say) as fluctuating in the neighborhood of 100,000 to 140,000 or so. That’s not quite as impressive as WoW’s population numbers, but it’s pretty damn respectable for a 7 year old game.

Your review did a good job of hitting the major points of the game. The only thing you failed to really hit is the fact that the pay-for options are fairly cheap compared to some MMOs, and you unlock the chat functions when you spend money on other stuff, rather than spending money JUST to unlock chat functions. I understand being frustrated with the communication issues, but like I mentioned above, the Help channel is actually superior to the original Broadcast in terms of communication breadth, and is available to everyone.

I was also somewhat amused that my vote for CoH to be covered was one of the ones you scrolled past when describing the community’s support of the game.

So, I guess my review of your review is favorable? It was a fair assessment overall, even if I disagreed with a little bit of it.

A fair well done review.

I do agree with the people who mention that enhancements can change the ‘slow’ pace of combat. While the ones initially available, Training Origin (TO) only provide a modest boost, 8% I think. when you reach level 12 you can purchase (or if you’re lucky) get Dual Origin (DO) enhancements as ‘loot’. DOs are twice as effective as TOs, and when you hit 22 you can get Single Origin (SO) which are twice as effective as DOs; so you wind up with a roughly 32% boost. With the enhancement slotting system, you can put 3 of the same kind in a power; so your level 22 character could put 3 recharge SOs into an attack, cutting the base recharge time 96% (without getting into Enhancement Diversification (ED), we’ll just call it the in-game cap. You can read up on ED elsewhere). This stacks with Hasten (which you can also put recharge enhancements into) to further cut down on the time.

I’ve been playing CoH for over six years now, and have tried EVE Online, LoTR, STO, and WAR, and so far CoH is what I keep coming back to.

On a related note, as Twoflower mentioned, with the in-game loot/crafting system, you can create characters able to take on large groups of enemies that are higher level than you, and do it on a routine basis. Especially with the post 50 content available now.

Really like this series; been watching for a while now.

Got back to playing CoH after seeing this review, and really like it. II tend to hate hassling with zillions of items that most MMOs thrive on giving you, so this is a nice simple and uncomplicated one. I like the combat, too. Less flash. You can come up with methodical combos that work well.

Don’t like that the enhancements keep going out. You should be able to get more, and upgrade them to a higher level, rather than have to scrap them and get a whole new one. It’s a neat concept, though, and provides good variety.

Also, some of the better NPC pathfinding out there. I’ve had a couple escort and follow missions, and the NPCs do a great job of keeping up. Might not happen often enough in games to make a note of it in reviews, but something to look out for.

Regarding reviews, would you consider adding technical information? Either in the review itself, or just post it in after the video. The download sites tend to not tell us how big of a download we’re going to face, or what it will do to our system. You mentioned the NCLauncher that had to be updated, so it might just be a case by case basis sort of thing, but it would be nice to come here and at a glance write off an MMO to try, because they have 2 gigs of crap to throw at us. Or to give one a shot, because it’s small, and my comp can easily handle it.

Yes or no, great job in any case.

One thing not mentioned in the review that needs to be about the Freedom system: If you have subscribed in the past, or are subscribing now and wish to go to a non-subscription experience, you will not lose anything you’ve paid to unlock, such as the extra ATs, or being able to use the Invention system. You also get more character slots, based on how many you earned through time subscribed or by purchasing slots with real money, and none of your characters will be erased for good. They’ll just be locked out until you either start subscribing again, or use an unlock token. There is very little that a Premium level player (former subscriber, or one that has spent money in the Market to earn rewards) cannot do. The chat system woes are not a factor if you have ever paid money to play this game.

One piece of advice for future reviews: please stick to the lingo of the game you’re reviewing. There are no quests in CoH. They are missions. There are no guilds. They are called Super Groups. You might be trying to compare this game’s experience with what is familiar to players of other games, but you also make it sound like you really haven’t done much research or actually played the game if you can’t get the terminology right.

Fairly even handed review, good job. That is why we think you are great at this – You might not get everything and miss some subtle nuances; but you come at it from the perspective of someone who is new to the game, which is what other new people should be hearing. And your play/pay/pass rating system gives a lot more information than arbitrary fractions (I’d like to see more gaming review sites switch to a model like this).

A couple of things of note; While I’m not entirely sure to what level you took your character(s?), the combat improves immensely in the later levels. While the recharges on your powers do slow things down considerably in the early levels, as you level up (gaining 1 new power ever 2 levels until 32), additional powers start filling in the gaps. Giving full attack chains, and much less waiting for something to recharge.

Fortunately low-level enemies have a similar dearth of abilities. Those red and gold steam-punky soldiers that face-planted you several times in the video were balanced around characters closer to 35-40(+). Even though the side-kicking system allows you to fight alongside your team-mates at their level – the truth is that you still lack the tools to effectively deal with them.

(also, you mentioned a lack of auto-powers, you can set a single attack at a time to auto by ctrl+clicking the icon)

And finally, RE the cash shop, I would have liked to see a bit more in-depth info about the “massive rewards pyramid”, Some of the things it unlocks alleviates some of your concerns – a simple initial $5 purchase promotes you from ‘free’ to ‘premium’, and removes a good chunk of the chat restrictions.

As for pvp… you’re not missing much. It’s a long story. :/

At any rate, thanks for this review, as a 7 year veteran of the game, I have dealt with the quirks for so long that they are second nature at this point, it’s refreshing to hear from the other side of the coin.

Harming your actual customer capacity to communicate in what is decidedly a social game is a huge no-no. The Free To Play players are too valuable to everyone involved to put those sort of restrictions on them. It literally makes me cringe to see CoH resort to this, as there are far better ways to address the root of the problem (the currency sellers / spammers) than make everyone suffer for it. Really it comes across as them trying to inconvenience me so hard that I’ll give in and break out my wallet.

Oh well. Another fun episode here behind us. Another comment from me asking for NEStalgia to be reviewed. One of these days you’ll break and do it, perhaps.

Fair review of the game i love, thank you.

As most state, we have tried to get them to loosen the chat restrictions, it’ll come, just wait, we are not going quietly into the night!
Super Group (Guild) access is granted as a premium player, to become a premium player all you need to do is spend cash on the game. Even a one time payment of $5 in Paragon Points will upgrade a F2P account to Premium, and will unlock a lot of content, and lift several chat restrictions.

This is my 1st, and still only MMO i play. I have been here for 2.5 years, much shorter than most of my friends, but i was glad i found people who helped me and taught me so much about the game. That made me do the same now for others.
I can not comment or compare CoX to any other MMO, i never played them, i have seen footage but that’s it. All i can say, withing hours of playing this game, i became addicted. I have several level 50 toons, 50 is the level cap, but most of the time i play just one toon.

If you never played this game and you want to try it out, most of the servers have a bunch of great people on them. As stated, Virtue is the Role Play server, so if you’re in to that, check it out. If you want to have fun, and enjoy the game with people who want to help, pick any server. I’m on Guardian, my toon Nephila is well known on the server… See you in game :)

All it takes to open up chat restrictions is to buy something… anything in the cash shop. My daughter spent a mere five dollars on the shop and she could chat away with anyone she liked.

Yeah a lot of the community went against the huge chat restrictions that came through but Marketting and the devs refused to budge. To the point they actually disabled a way which let free 2 play people communicate with non-free 2 play people. As Two Flower said, we get WHY they did it but still, it makes the biggest aspect of CoH, the Community, completely seperated from the Free 2 play community.

For me it was the slow combat that really turned me off. The combat system is a deal breaker for me when it comes to action MMO’s. If Im not having fun with it by the time I reach level 15 then Im out. I dont do the whole “but it gets fun once you get to endgame” crap. Its no different than the “the first 60 hours of a game that’ll take you 65 hours to beat kinda sucks, but once you get past that 60 hour mark then it gets REALLY good”. Personally I found the combat to be smoother and much MUCH more intuitive in CO than I did in this game.

After reading so many comments about how good this game was I had high hopes. There were things I did like, like the travel powers and the way you could augment your combat powers in addition to other parts of your character. I liked the inspirations, they were useful enough to warrant using them consistently and dropped frequent enough so you didnt have to horde them like a squirrel preparing for the winter months. I liked the contacts, Im not sure why. I guess it was cool to see my character use a cell phone.

Aside from the combat, I didnt like how vague the mission instructions were. I dont expect a giant arrow that says “GO HERE” but when the mission says “Go to the park and find the entrance” and you spend 45 minutes looking for an entrance only to realize that you werent actually supposed to into the park because the entrance youre looking for is on the side of a cliff just outside the park, then something doesnt add up. Plus add in the fact that you cant even ask somebody for help because of the chat restrictions. Just do what alot of other games with the ‘pseudo free to play’ model uses, have a global chat and a local chat with a level restriction on global chat, and a level restricted message limit on the local chat (i.e. at level 1 can only send 1 message every 10 seconds, at level 10 2 messages every 10 seconds), with local chat being visible only to those with in the immediate vicinity of your character. Finally, the last thing I experienced that I didnt like was the fast respawn with the slow combat. Those are two things that dont compliment others very well and only serves to demonstrate how flawed the combat system is.

These are just my opinions, take them as you will.

Hey if you ever want to do Guild Wars then I can help you if you want. I have a lot of experience with the game save for a few PvP areas but I know someone who does a lot of PvP to balance that out. Also I am that same guy who offered the same on the Guild Wars 2 mesmer page at Blistered Thumbs sorry if you read it already.