I was reflecting on how CO was developed. I played CoX until mid 2008, I remembered a few things it was post on the forums as the problems on CoX:

1) The archtype limitation, I can’t make my hero.

2) Indoor missions, they were considered cheap and some were asking for more significant activity outdoors.

3) Slow combat, the cooldowns were bothering many people.

4) Leveling speed and soloing, leveling solo was painfully slow so it was teaming or prepare for a long leveling process, even worse with a support archtype.



The funny thing is that it looks like CO was designed to address those “issues” (among other things):

1) Classless system with non exclusive frameworks organized in tiers. Now, some complain that is too complicated and that every build is not perfectly balanced to any other build.

2) Outdoor missions, where provided mainly at early stages, still it proved to be not as good as it was thought.

3) Fast combat usually implies less CC for balance and reducing a bit the number of powers used since you can always use the one(s) that brings you the best result.

4) Addressing soloing and stopping powerleveling, led to low incentive (xp wise) to go into a group. Besides, the leveling is a lot of faster. The result was many people at cap level complaining about not having much to do.

For me, it was interesting, to see how listening vocal players without a careful analysis could lead to mistakes. I would take the example of Wow in this case, they have the power to ignore most vocal players since they have the power of numbers. How many times ragequit post were answered by other players with “You quitting, your friends quitting, even your neighborhood quitting, makes no dent to wow”.
Just to clarify, this is no a thread to relieve Cryptic from those problems but I think it is interesting if that perception of how things happened is close to the truth.

I would like to know the opinion of other people about it, did I think too much and made the wrong conclusions?

The answer is: Yes, but none of the things you listed are examples of it.

You're posting under the assumption that those four points are negative to the game.

Personally, I prefer those and that's why I will never pay CoH again no matter how many free weekends they throw my way.

People don't quit Champions because the game sucks.. they quit Champions for other reasons, related to how Atari and Cryptic manage the business side of it.

The best example of listening to players killing a game is Vanguard. Vanguard's alpha/early beta stages were glutted with the hardcore pvp everywhere gankmaster types left over from the early days of UO.

It completely ruined the playability of the game early on for a large majority of their potential audience.

Completely agreed, about those 4 specific issues. Those are some of the best features of the game.

As for the title of thread, of course, it's obvious that listening to players can backfire. Unfortunately, the fear of that happening usually makes developers err in the wrong direction, and ignore a lot of excellent suggestions from their players.

Sorry if I gave the impression that they were negative to me. Actually, I like those features, but I was referring that some people (some still here, others long gone) complained about one or more of those changes from CoX. What I was trying to point out is that those features might have been in response to a feedback that Cryptic got from players at CoX.

I remember a contingent who were against any Team realated content being in the game, and they had the devs ears during beta.

This game suffered a great deal as a result and still suffers to this day (Did you know I get better rewards FASTER Soloing serpent Lantern/Demonflame than teaming to do it?).

its too late now now, as the community has left and this game is on maintainance mode.
There aren't enough funds to fix what limits CO, and without those fixes it won't grow its subscription base.

Can you be on maintenance mode when you have new content being added?

"Content" that takes me 1-2 hours to get through? It's not real content at all! We've been ROPERED! MAINTENANCE MODE.

That's because the majority of the early player base came over from CoH after YEARS of playing CoH. Very few people came over here from real MMOs that were developed post-WoW. Most of them probably put their heads back into CoH and haven't left since.

As for soloing adventure packs....why would you do that to yourself? Those things are are totally boring by yourself. Better rewards are only an illusion really. It's just more efficient to solo them. That's why you shouldn't be able to solo them. Wait....did I just describe in-door missions in CoH? Yes I did......except for it being more efficient.....

I do strongly believe that you shouldn't be able to solo everything in the game. SOME things should require you to team up. MOST things, like leveling, should be soloable. Adventure Packs, Lairs, Open Missions, Giant Monster fights, and Event themed Crisis zones should all require a team.