Out of the blue, NCSoft to shut down City of Heroes

I've never been able to get the "dedicated characters" thing to work very well except with just one person at a time. When it involves four or five people, it's never even close. Within a month somebody has to take a vacation, somebody has financial issues and has to drop their subscription, or Zloth… umm, somebody buys ES:Oblivion and vanishes for 10 weeks.

With CoH, somebody could be gone for YEARS and we could still pull them into whatever group had formed inside of ten minutes. Less if we cut out all the "OMG, he's back!!" chatter.

I agree it does make it "gamey". If your team size doubles, having the spawn sizes double very soon after makes it real clear that you're playing a game. I think it's well worth it, though. It might annoy me in a single player game but not in a multi-player where my main goal is having fun with friends.

Zloth said:

I've never been able to get the "dedicated characters" thing to work very well except with just one person at a time. When it involves four or five people, it's never even close. Within a month somebody has to take a vacation, somebody has financial issues and has to drop their subscription, or Zloth… umm, somebody buys ES:Oblivion and vanishes for 10 weeks.

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Well, I'm not going to say it's 100% smooth sailing. In my experience - those who have the most time - will tend to "overplay" with different characters, and they will have experienced much of the content way before the others, and they get sick of the game too soon.

I'm the sort of person who's quite flexible in a social setting - and will gladly not play for a long time if that's what's required. I can also focus on a game in terms of time - but only if everyone can agree it's the one to play.

But it's rare to find one game everyone agrees on in all ways. Still, I guess I've never really had much of an issue with level difference. We find some way around it.

I agree it does make it "gamey". If your team size doubles, having the spawn sizes double very soon after makes it real clear that you're playing a game. I think it's well worth it, though. It might annoy me in a single player game but not in a multi-player where my main goal is having fun with friends.

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It kinda depends. I can have fun with friends in all kinds of games - and MMOs is just one way.

But my preference is a kind of MMO that doesn't quite exist.

I'm waiting for ArcheAge - and I don't think that game would work well with complete level scaling. Not at all, in fact.

Then again, I doubt I can get many to play it with me