Profile of BeltFedWombat

Yep, CoH2.org has turned into a fucking echo chamber at the moment. I'm an old hand vCoH player and even I'm down on the negativity here. I might revisit this forum in a few weeks to see if it's got better, but Ami needs to know this place is getting a rep as being the RPGCodex of COH. That is to say a festering, gonzo pit of hate and bile. And it's not even *funny* hate and bile.

BeltFed Actual OUT.

I'm interested in discussing this without knocking developers. I want to understand the disconnect between players and designers. Is it hubris?

I'll get to CoH2 in a minute, but first... Diablo 3.

I loved Diablo 2 (never really played the original). D2 for me defined everything that made ARPGs awesome - stability of battle.net, collectibles, cool classes, the horadric cube, PvP, random dungeons, variable character builds...

Then along comes D3. The lead designer was carved from a giant, impenetrable block of hubris. Variable char builds? Nah. Twitchy modern gamers need an identical menu so they can reconfigure their character all the time accessing the same suite of skills. PvP? Eventually, but first we need THE AUCTION HOUSE!

The AH was to D3 what DLC Commanders are to CoH2. You buy and sell items and Blizzard takes a cut. Some people spend real money. Economics 101 - the AH killed D3. Why collect items and convert / pimp them like in D2 with the cube when you can just grind and buy?

Item inflation killed the game. On the forums Blizz were told, repeatedly, not to do it for obvious (to those not working at Blizz)reasons. They did it.

Less classes. Identikit skill trees. The Auction House.

Don't get me started on the permanent online requirement

Hubris. Hubris, everywhere. When the original dev of D2 made some noise he was machinegunned online in a deeply disrespectful way by the current devs.

What happened? Sales declined. D3 is dead, we wailed. I got 100 friend requests a week from gold spammers. My character felt and looked like everyone else's.

The dev team stuck their fingers in their ears and went nyah nyah nyah!!!

Then guess what happened? When the expansion was planned they parachuted in a new, more conciliatory lead designer. He's being paid a fortune to do what was fucking obvious from day one --- kill the Auction House. He admitted some mistakes. Things, if they didn't get better, got less bad.

Is any of this sounding familiar? Nickel-and-diming suits, greedy bastards with no understanding of game design, pressing revenue models on designers who are forced to walk the plank with the customers?

I'd like the financial and business side of games development to come down here, into the cyber-mud of the community, and justify their bone-headed, fucktarded decisions. I want them to take some flak. I want them stripped of their hubris.

TL;DR - what's wrong with most modern videogames is obvious to everyone except the greedy bastards in the executive wash-room.

Am I wrong?

CoHO was awesome and I loved it to bits.

It was totally upfront about the P2W aspect and you couldn't argue with it.

I'm still waiting for the 222 Ace.

Would you also introduce map rotation for vcoh again? There are some nice new maps made in the past, which were part of some tourneys too.

* strongly agree *