They could make the flood of minions a weak distraction before whoever’s leading the outfit, but then that becomes an unnecessary annoyance. They could remove the minions altogether and just have the boss-fights, but then you’re looking at a crippled action-rpg. To make the game more interactive they’ve got to have the minions doing something that would impact you negatively if they finished their task, but then you’re getting into what they’ve half-assedly tried to do in PvP zones. In the end: it’s an MMO.

Of course the constant nerfs, the amatuerish use of status effects to buff the mobs vs players and all the other hackish changes made by Statesman won’t stop the players who can’t just leave their investment of time from continuing to play. CoH never had much in the way of content. However it did let you play a superhero and you could kick some serious arse… that didn’t fit in with Jack’s vision so it is gone, leaving behind a very average game.

In the end all CoH will be left with are the ultimate fanbois… I think it is already starting to get to that stage, hence the desperate attempts to get people back.

Yeah, you’re right. Why, right now I’m just as bored as I can be, sitting on this rock in the middle of a forest preserve, waiting for 5 minutes as the tank runs out into the wilderness to gather up the wolves. I can’t follow him, I’ll die, and besides, it’ll mess up his pull. I just have to sit here and wait until he gets back, and then the controller will jump down and freeze the entire trailing mob solid, and then I get to hop down and hit one, maybe two, attack powers before they’re all wiped out, then I climb back up on the rock and wait for another 5 minutes.

…oh, wait, sorry, flashback. Actually right now I’m trailing close behind the tank, with the rest of the team, firing off my powers as quickly as they recharge, and the controller saves his giant disable for when we get blindsided by a patrol.

–GF

I’m a solo’er at heart, and CoH doesn’t support that (at any reasonable speed) with most of its archtypes. I quit around the time I hit lvl 20, and didn’t look back util CoV came out. I found the archtypes a lot more fun in dynamic — and soloing as an MM or Brute was unquestionably fast — but I still slacked off when I hit the high-30’s and cancelled the account. A couple friends and I got the email and decided we’d make complementary characters and get a jumpstart on a blitz to 50 so we can play around with Kheldians. It’s a marketing gimmick, and it likely won’t end up being much fun, but I can’t blame them for taking advantage of the fact that a hefty share of MMO gamers are bored and disillusioned.

- Roll back the nerfs so that people are playing superheroes again.
- Fire Statesman and never, ever, listen to him again.

And, if you plan a stress test for your hardware, you will get this at a planned time.

They could benefit from WoW’s rest system, which I personally have grown to love. If I play a lot, I still make progress, or I can play a few characters and have decent progress on all of them (assuming I’m not just chain-playing them), or I can take a week off the game, come back, and have screaming exp. In the end, it’s probably the same exp (I never parsed it), but I didn’t “fall behind”. Makes the grinding less grindy.

One thing that WoW probably stole from CoX was the exp bonus on mission completion (i.e. the exp you get on quest completion in WoW). Except in certain minor, and frequently nerfed cases, EQ’s quest experience was almost non-existant. Well, let’s be honest, it’s quest system sucks as a whole, but that’s another story. Completing a mission in CoH was usually a really nice chunk of exp, which is how I used to level up quickly.