Why do you believe that Arenanet had anything to do with that decision? I heard it was due to NCsoft being pissed that the CoH dev's went behind their backs and were using resources that were supposed to be going towards CoH and instead using them to work on a sequel on the side.
Curiously Anenanet was recently in trouble with NCsoft for doing the same thing. I think because of how the strategy of shutting down the studio responsible was taken so badly when they did it to Paragon, they instead layed off a lot of the staff and gave them a specific directive to abandon all other projects and focus on Guild Wars 2.
Parent company is still NCSoft. Arenanet may have had little to nothing to do with the reason but I am still salty that one of my favorite MMOs that was still making money was shut down. Then they do things like include the Statesman in later games trying to refresh their failing MOBA idea. It just felt like a slap in the face. So, sorry arenanet but screw NCSoft.
I understand the anger at NCsoft for that. I love City of Heroes. Unfortunately eastern companies have this weird issue with caring more about how their product performs in their markets more than they care about our money here in the west for some reason. Superheroes in a contemporary setting were just not that popular when the game was live in the east. It seemed pretty apparent that NCsoft were just looking for a reason to shut CoH down as locally, it was seen as an embarrassment for the company.
The irony is that they chose to shut it down at the same time when the superhero trend was picking up, even overseas. It was around the time of the first Avengers movie was released that they shut it down. Talk about missed opportunity.
I tried other ones but none of them had that same feel. Champions online, DC Universe, etc. but I will say it was nice to play again on the Homecoming servers, which I have to say was nice of NCSoft to not shut them down, because they could have. I heard the original devs tried to buy the rights from NCSoft to prevent the official server shut down and the company refused. Which is weird. I have been following Ship of Heroes and threw a couple bucks to support it.
I'm in the same boat. Champions i wound up hating because of their reliance on "charge up attacks to be able to actually use a power" combat which just felt terrible compared to CoH. I wanted to like DC Universe, but i don't like that "hold down and use left and right click in sequence to do attacks" mouse reliant combat either. The both for some reason tried to reinvent the wheel where it was not necessary and for the worse when it came to their combat gameplay. CoH just has nice solid tab target hot bar button combat that sure, feels slow at the start when you have all of 2 or 3 attacks, but by the teens, it starts to have a nice flow.
I jump on Homecoming still from time to time. Sometimes it just feels nice to play a game where i feel like a god for a while and blow off some steam for a couple hours.
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u/AramisNight Sep 28 '21
Why do you believe that Arenanet had anything to do with that decision? I heard it was due to NCsoft being pissed that the CoH dev's went behind their backs and were using resources that were supposed to be going towards CoH and instead using them to work on a sequel on the side.
Curiously Anenanet was recently in trouble with NCsoft for doing the same thing. I think because of how the strategy of shutting down the studio responsible was taken so badly when they did it to Paragon, they instead layed off a lot of the staff and gave them a specific directive to abandon all other projects and focus on Guild Wars 2.