An uncommon MMO
Computer Gaming World hailed the game saying "City of Heroes blows a super powered gust of fresh air into an increasingly stale sword-and-sorcery MMO world" in August of 2004. PC Gamer, Game Informer, GameSpy and several other industry magazines critically acclaimed City of Heroes for its foray into the superhero genre and gave the game top or near top scores across the board.
GameSpy went on to say that City of Heroes has the most flexible character creator to date of any MMORPG (in particular the costume design system allows for a huge variety of sizes, colors, clothing types and other bells and whistles) and has consistently given the update issues high marks. The launch of City of Heroes was widely reported as one of the most successful MMOG launches in the history of the industry.
Accessible development community
It also is often praised for having a development team that actively communicates with its player base. The development team will admit mistakes and also implement player suggestions. The communication level between players and developers is such that players can actually send private messages to the developer accounts, get their suggestion/question/complaint read, and possibly even responded to.
Casual-play friendly
Also, the game is praised because a subscriber's characters are not deleted, even if the subscription has been canceled or inactive for an extended period of time. Some MMORPGs delete a character after a period of inactivity. In anticipation of the release of City of Villains, Cryptic announced on October 10, 2005 that effective October 24, 2005, accounts which had been unpaid and inactive for 90 days would have the names of any characters on the account under level 35 flagged as unreserved, allowing new players to use that name. The character itself was left untouched, and a player who lost his character's name was given the option to choose a new one. This policy was suspended on May 4, 2006, because Cryptic's data-mining had shown that very few names were being taken in this fashion anymore; Cryptic said 30 days' notice would be given prior to future changes to the name policy. On July 31, 2007, Cryptic announced that the name policy would go back into effect as of August 29, 2007, but this time, it would apply only to characters under level 6, instead of the previous 35.