Anyway, over at Cryptic Towers they're running into the age-old problem that given thousands of people hammering on your game, they'll eventually find the path of least resistance through the content. As usual, this is seen not as the players succeeding, but as the system failing; as if it's impossible for the players to get better at playing the game.
Statesman identifies the problem thus:
The system holds up pretty well up until the mid to late twenties, but once players can purchase S.O.’s in the stores, their abilities rapidly outstrip the curve. Enhancements ended up being priced too cheaply (something that we’ll change sometime soon). In order to find something fun to do (i.e. something that had an element of risk), players needed to hunt in zones; missions became boring.
That is, even as the player adds to and learns their characters abilities and how best to use them, this shouldn't have any bearing on the “difficulty” of the combat. A level one character fighting three level one minions should be in the same situations as a level 30 character fighting three level 30 minions.
Personally, I think that repetition leads to the boredom far more than a lack of “challenge”. The last time I logged into CoH I had three missions on the go:
Ramping up the difficulty of them would have not budged my ennui one jot. If anything, the thought of spending even longer on the map waiting for health and stamina to return would be even more off-putting, especially if every battle was a do-or-die down-to-my-last health battle royale. And let's be honest, much of whether you survive in CoH is down to the random number generator - you've not played much CoH if you've not beaten one yellow minion without breaking sweat, then had the next one have you chugging inspirations just to get out alive because of the RNG.
As far as I see it, the one “hero equal[s] 3 to 4 minions” balance goal is what's causing the boredom rather than its breaking as players level up. Effectively, CoH has only five different types of opponent: minion, lieutenant, boss, arch-villian and monster. It's not surprising people get bored with that.
Yep, that's pretty much why I haven't logged on in awhile. I did one of the Striga Isle mission sets when it first came out and while, granted, the set I did was meant for a little lower level than me, it still was fun.
Then I started the next set, which was meant for my level. And while the mobs were different, the missions were almost exactly the same. The only difference was instead of defeating 10 you now had to defeat 20. I just ended up logging out on the water and haven't logged in again since.