Candor

very nice

/roll

I've been playing CoH on and off since launch and have yet to get a single 50 (highest is 44), curse of an altoholic I'm afraid. So personally no, I don't always get to see my plans come to fruition. But that's not the point, I make builds for characters that are never created, just to see how far I can take it, what I can do within the limits of the game. Sometimes I come across something that looks like a lot of fun and I start coming up with character ideas. So planning the build is really where my characters start out and they take form from there. That's how I do it anyway.

You touched on a lot of things I love about CoH Valdamar, and after recently starting it back up for Going Rogue I had forgotten how laid back grouping could be in that game. There's no posting your gear score or build to get into a group; hell, level hardly matters at all. Just get 8 players together and unleash chaos. This is exactly what I did last night on my scrapper (planned out to 50) with my mm friend (no plan whatsoever). We got into a group, set the max difficulty and ran through radio missions, no one person wasn't able to pull their weight. After playing WoW for so long it's a nice change of pace.

I think CoH has near-perfect character development to where you can min-max or just take whatever looks nice and you can still have fun.

The problem I think most people have with planning is that there is usually some powers or talents that are must-haves. "If you don't get these you're no good." I think a few developers are realizing this and making changes, CoH for example making the Fitness tree inherent; or WoW remaking the talent trees with the Mastery aspect being an automatic upgrade for picking a tree.

There are good and bad approaches to character development, limiting or not supplying respecs, and offering no choices are bad approaches. I enjoy character planning and going as deep as the system allows. It's sort of like being able to see how awesome I'll be at the end, or just ensure that the road has as few bumps and holes as possible.

And if all this planning isn't for you, do what my friends do and find someone who likes it to do it for you...

I really enjoy games that allow for planning. City of Heroes especially, I could spend hours designing character builds (and have) just to see what I could come up with. So I disagree that it's "artificial," it allows for a greater diversity among players. The hallmark of a great system is that everyone can go as deep as they wish, from the "spur of the moment" choosers to those that plan each step.

That said I also enjoy skill based games like PSU or Vindictus that have minimal or no character planning and you just get in and fight. I wonder if the 2 are not mutually exclusive.

I think the point most people who ridicule the "get a controller" comment are trying to get across is that, in the MMO market, most people use keyboards and mice. If you don't at least make it comfortable for those people you're alienating a large portion of the market. There are cases of games that suit both play styles, I for one loved using a controller in Champions Online, my friends were happy with keyboards and didn't feel obligated to use a controller. This design choice along with a few others (market place) lead me to believe SE doesn't understand the MMO market nowadays.

After having played the open beta for 2 days I have a much different view on this game. The one area I think everyone can agree on is that it is very very pretty. The character art (though not diverse), clothing, object, buildings, landscape is all beautiful. The world however is very repetitive, walking from Gridania to Ul'dah i saw the same terrain time and time and time again. So the world is not only small (even taking into account we can't access it all) it's all cut n' paste.

I love using gamepads for games on my pc and was looking forward to pulling out my 360 controller, but even with a controller the UI is far from good. There are MMOs that pulled off controller use better than this game and still manage to allow keyboard and mouse users their comfort.

The one quest chain that's common in all cities is well done and I enjoyed going through it, but once it was over you're left with guildleves (yes beta, should be fixed). To use the same comparison in the article I've recently been working on the Loremaster achievement in WoW and am ~80 quests from finishing the classic ones. I would do any of those quests including the noob starter quests than do another guildleve. WoW never told me to trek several miles from town to kill 3 rats because an inn back in town had an infestation (not even giant rats, like regular sized rats).

As to combat, "Combat isn't the stupid hotbar combat that you're used to," it's worse.

Cryptic needs to just switch to a free-to-play model, I'm sure they'd do fine with their cash shop and it's just the right price for their games.

Yea recall friend is made for pranks, though I never abused it on strangers. Most of my friends quickly learned to turn on the prompt so I couldn't teleport them off buildings and what not; all cept one who refused to turn on the prompt. I found a little food stand on the docks in CoV that you can teleport into but can't get out by normal means. Now all my friends have the prompt active.