Hiding statistics from players
One out-of-date criticism is that City of Heroes did not reveal full numerical values within the game for powers and abilities. Instead, vague descriptors (such as "low," "medium," "high," "superior," "extreme," "short," "medium," "slow," "long," and "very long") are used to describe the effects of the various skills and powers of the characters. This arguably rendered players unable to make accurate informed decisions concerning powers with similar performance. It also introduced the possibility of a power's strength being adjusted without player knowledge, whether by oversight or intentionally. However, in a patch released February 2008 the development team added a new interface to optionally display almost all the numbers.
According to a post by Jack Emmert, the decision to withhold precise information was due, in part, to his belief that too much complexity overwhelms first-time players and hinders an MMORPG's success (although he also admits he may have been incorrect on that issue due to World of Warcraft subsequently achieving mass-market success despite revealing almost all numbers to its players). With the Issue 7 update, complete numbers for many powers, mostly from City of Villains power sets, were released in a free add-on to a previously released commercial strategy guide for City of Heroes/Villains. With the February 2008 patch, players can now open a window for this information along with stats not given with the free guide update. Issue 12 also reveals this information with Enhancement placement before a character commits to purchasing or using them (showing their multipliers as well as the old percentage values), as well as providing a display in the Enhancement screen that displays all statistics of any enhancement that is highlighted.
Enhancement Diversification
A significant game play change called Enhancement Diversification, or ED, was implemented in Issue 6. ED received strong negative feedback from the player community. The response thread to ED on the official City of Heroes message forum exceeded 3,500 replies in the first 36 hours, and soon after grew so large that a second thread was required due to forum software limits.
ED imposed a point of sharply diminished returns on how far each individual aspect of each power could be improved. Prior to ED, a player could focus all enhancements on only one of a power's aspects and receive fully cumulative benefits. Cryptic's stated reason behind ED was "to promote the use of more different types of Enhancements in powers". Critics observed that ED universally reduced the maximum possible effectiveness of all characters, making it a global nerf; that many defensive powers had now been significantly weakened for two Issues in a row, which was especially frustrating for characters who specialize in such powers and invalidated many of their existing tactics; that some powers cannot legally or usefully accept more than one type of Enhancement and thus cannot be "diversified"; that it was deceitful to enact such a severe change less than a month after officially announcing "we¡¯ve finished making large changes to the power sets"; and that ED was too fundamental a change to implement so long after the original launch. Some, but not all, of the negative effects of Enhancement Diversification were negated with the release of the Invention system in Issue 9, allowing players to create one enhancement that affects multiple statistics at once, while still honoring the limits created with ED during Issue 6.