I Quit
Just as RPG.net seems to be riding the CoH wave, just as my real life gaming buddies are getting into it, I've lost all interest in it. This came home to me when I played it again briefly last week, as one of the aforementioned buddies and some 'net pals of his started characters on Infinity. We had TeamSpeak set up, so could talk in real time as we ran around punching things. I made a new character, as I've never tried any server other than Virtue, and decided I'd play a ninja. A Natural Scrapper, in the parlance of the game. My buddy was all excited about the game, being a MMORPG addict and superhero nerd already. By all rights, this should've given me new energy and interest in CoH. Problem was, instead of making me like it more, it made me want to hit myself in the face.
First off, I should note I played this game as a Beta tester for two or three months before it went live. I made the character I had planned to make since I heard about it with a RP-friendly group of people I knew from the bboards. We formed a team and joked around and fought bad guys and discovered the game together. When the alien invasion thing (sort of) happened on the last night of the Beta, we got together to watch for saucers like it was a virtual party.
This was when the game was still fun.
Before this, I had never conceived myself as a MMORPG type - I'd seen my buddies play these things and I was agog at how deadly dull they were. Everything was a repetition of some banal pseudo-game with the sporadic "hey d00dz" talk to make up the social equation. My usual metaphor for their activity was "a monkey punching buttons to get a banana". City of Heroes seemed to be different, though.
After the Beta reboot, I messed up in name-claim-jumping and ended up having to make a new name for my second character. This guy turned out to be rather less inspired and generally less interesting than my first - but his powerset was much more powerful and seemed to fit my playstyle. So, even though I made barely any effort to invest him with personality as the supergroup developed, I slogged through levelling up again. As I did so, though, I noticed the same missions, same bad guys, same environments and general sameness of things. I started to find other things to do at night, which meant I was never around when the supergroup was up to anything as a collective team. If and when I sporadically logged in, they weren't around or were far, far advanced compared to my character.
My attempts to team up with others outside of the supergroup were at best fitful and occasionally painful. It got to the point where I felt better about trying to SOLO a mission than recruit a bunch of random strangers to my cause. But this was a somewhat masochistic exercise; as I reached the double-digit levels, the difficulty curve on missions spiked and all it took was a single boss to drop me. Debt began to accrue in monstrous amounts and my level progression slowed to a painful crawl. I found myself going to areas with lots of random monst...er, "supervillains"...to try and make up some debt so I could potentially eventually level so as to be able to tackle a mission that had been repeatedly killin' me.
In other words, I was becoming the monkey punching the buttons. There was no social interplay to speak of, no reward beyond a new number, and everything felt painfully familiar and redundant. Worse than that, I was paying a subscription for a game I was playing perhaps one hour a week now. It was boring and pointless. But then my friends from our tabletop group and some of their net buddies got together to play it, and I thought maybe I could find what excited me about the game again by playing with them and experiencing it all as a group.
I couldn't have been more wrong. Here was a bunch of "veteran" MMORPG players, people who'd likely caught the wave of Evercrack in its earliest inception and played every other iteration of that genre since. People who could play for eight hours straight and still want more. My gamer buddy introduced me to two of them, a married couple. After some half-assed greetings, I found myself teamed with the three of them, running around as they jumped from one mission to another as if their very lives depended on it. The chat? "There's one. In the corner." "Got him." "Good job honey." Then - once more - off we ran, making for the next mission entrance with no pausing to wait for anybody else much less attempt to coordinate anything. My character was pretty useless, and for a ninja, he seemed awfully like every other Scrapper I'd played. I watched as they played and listened to the husband and wife congratulating each other on getting bad guys and slowly felt all my love for the game shrivelling up and finally dying.
Maybe I'll go back. I'm sure there'll be some new feature I'll be curious to look at. But for now, the following things are keeping me far from it and any other MMORPG out there:
1) Its repititious to the point of being maddening. Once you've done perhaps ten missions, you've seen the extent of the game's offerings for most of the first 20 levels. I can't claim to have gone beyond that, but y'know - if its that repetitive for that amount of gameplay - and thats a LOT of gameplay, people, several hours over several weeks - then I don't particularly care what's after that. Seeing the same animations and bad guys over and over and over and knowing you'll seem them again for a hundred or more times - that starts to wear on you.
2) Teaming up isn't as much fun as it should be. The supergroup I was with made being on a team fun, and I thought everybody was like that. BZZT. Wrong. Almost NOBODY is like that. Your average player just wants to speedily complete whatever they're up to with as little personality and chitchat as possible. Your below average player...well, they're as shitty as everybody says they are. It is also pathetically easy to feel like you're not contributing to the team at all. Defenders seem to be the most potent by far of all Types, at least in far as overall effect on the playing field is concerned. A Scrapper or Blaster's tactical options? "Target, damage, repeat". Woo hoo. And God Forbid you have people of varying levels on the team. Even with the sidekicking ability at higher levels, there's little need to do much more than watch in a lot of instances.
3) Nothing you do matters. You can smack down five hundred bad guys and foil five billion plots, but none of it has any impact on anything anywhere. I realize you can't have cause-and-effect on par with a tabletop campaign in something where thousands of people are running around, but the total dearth of dynamics and there being nothing at stake at all sucks a lot of the fun out of the game for me. The only change? Your character gets more powers. Speaking of which...
4) Levelling makes me cry. Yeah, I know; its fun to get new gimmicks. Its neat to feel a sense of growing potence. But, damn if the game doesn't seem to make that feel unnecessary. All your missions scale based on your level and there's no reward or point to fighting things far beneath you, so you'll never truly feel like you're ahead of the curve. Even new movement powers - which are probably the most satisfying acquisitions to get - get overly familiar after a while. And heaven forbid you don't Maximize your character based on Type. If you choose stuff outside of their limited powersets for power pools, you can easily end up with useless "junk" abilities.
5) Types suck. I hate how they reduce every team to the same characters with different costumes and numbers. I hate how it makes your tactical options pre-determined. I know, I know. "They had to make it playable!" I know it'd be wrong to have all powers available to everyone because it'd imbalance things. But damn if I didn't feel things were already imbalanced to begin with; why not just give up the pretense and let people focus on concept over tactical feasibility? At the very least they could have more damn choices rather than walk slowly up two or three ladders to nowheresville.
6) I hate moving around the city. Yeah, its neat how it seems like a real, vibrant city (almost). I like the way its big and sprawling. Thats cool. But the actual work of running across a city to get to a single door so as to enter one of a billion same-looking missions? And taking that damn Tram? Graaah. Is there ever any non-conceptual reason NOT to take flight or teleportation as fast as you can? If you don't, you just get to slow everything down for yourself and everybody on the team as you slog through increasingly mob-laden areas. Maybe I'm spoiled by the freedom of movement offered by - well, every other type of game in existence. But damn, I hate actually GOING anywhere in the city.
So. Yeah. After all that time, all the fun had as a Beta tester, I quit, canceled my subscription. Spider-Man 2's proving a Hella lot cooler anyways.
I didn't check the boards after we moved, and I don't know if you'll get this, but I'll miss you. I know you stopped by my MUSH when I wasn't on. (oim.wolfpaw.net port 1960)
I do agree with you. P:R makes the game better. Feel free to just drop by and chat, though.
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