Between Vacation, then Stuff, now more Vacation, I fear I’ve not been posting much here.
Which, since I’m headed off to Vacation some more, isn’t going to change soon.
But I’ve been doing a bit of CoX play, actually got onto a high-level PUG that wasn’t doing AE farming (or even AE), and enjoyed myself immensely, despite that godawful lag.
Need to play more …
If I said that the new face designs shown here as new for I15 strike me as being much the same as what are currently available, would I sound ungrateful?
What I’d almost rather see these days is actual emotive faces. A baseline face that you can make smile or frown or grimace. That would be nice.
Played with our Masterminds over the weekend — lvl 33 (my highest CoV character), and still having fun. Took down Mynx and Back Alley Brawler easy-peasy (albeit as EBs).
I was disappointed to discover that there’s no Hair Lightning as an aura. I don’t want my eyes to be all lightiningy — I want my brain to be. I am The Gifted Kid, dagnabbit!
I was looking the other day for some of the new juggling emotes. Alas, as BAB explains, the Quickmenu isn’t designed to deal with conditional emotes (juggling is from the Mystic booster pack). Though he indicates (without telling how) that you can actually edit the Quickmenu file …
If you want to be in future closed betas, make constructive comments on the existing I15 open beta.
Reichsman has 226K HP? Yikes! Though it’s good to hear that he has a “considerably lower than standard regen rate.”
T-shirts! Meesa want! Well, actually … nice enough, but nothing compelling enough to make me break my oft-broken vow of No More T-Shirts Until I Get Rid of Many of the Ones I Already Have.
Finally got some game time last night, waiting for Margie to arrive home. Signed on with Miss Crackle, and immediately got an invite … in Atlas?
Ah.
I was a bit hesitant when I saw the team was gathering for some Mission Architect play, but as it turned out, it was actually fun. It was refreshing play some AE that was interesting, with a good group, and (most importantly) not farming. Which we did, including a few missions that were a real hoot.
While I did see some farming requests at AE between mishes (”PLZ INVIT LVL 42 LF AE FARM!”), they were few and far between.
I might have to go hang out there more often.
I was actually inspired enough, when all was over, to hop onto Lady Zebra and look for some scrapper action. Alas, nobody was inviting in the low 30s on Virtue by that time of night, so I did some solo mishes, enjoyed them immensely, then welcomed Margie home.
Cool article on the Munitions, Archery, and Gadgeteering power sets in Champs Online. These represent gun-based powers, archery (duh), and any number of roboticist / “toyman” / “mad thinker” sort of inventor goodness.
One of the nice things noted here (in context of the munitions) is that, once you’ve acquired a given weapon form, then as you get additional powers and enhancements, you can apply them to the forms you have / want. Love those pistols? You can keep using them with your added attacks. Want to be carrying around an arsenal? Sounds like you can.
Customization = good. I hate being stuck with either a single weapon (see CoX AR Blasters) or have to trade in the weapon I like for the latest most-powerful thing I’ve found (see LotRO).
Also: new screen shots.
But, between unpacking and tagging photos and taking care of a sick spouse, I’ve not done any gaming since returning yesterday evening. That will, in fact, change soon.
In the meantime, news that’s been accumulating in the in-box …
Champs Online:
City of Heroes:
We’re off tomorrow to a different city where people cluster around costumed characters all day (Walt Disney World), so barring Positron showing up on my doorstep tonight or something of that nature, this blog will likely be going quiet for a week.
Be heroic! (Or, if you swing that way, villainous!) We’ll see you when we get back.
Plusses: gorgeous, lots of character creation options, a power-switching mechanism that makes gameplay a bit more easy and varied.
I have to say here that of all of the MMORPGs I’ve played over the years, Champions Online has, hands down, some of the most stunning graphics I’ve seen in an MMORPG. The team decided to go for a cel-shaded comic book style with this game, and let me tell you, it works.
[...] In combat, players can ‘charge’ their attacks to make them do more damage, or gain extra utility in their execution. Not only this, but the game utilizes a form of ‘endurance,’ that goes up as players use light damage ‘charging’ moves, and is then expended when the player uses a heavy damage ‘draining’ move. Think of it like the Warrior’s ‘Rage’ system in World of Warcraft, or the Warpriest / Disciple of Khaine in Warhammer Online.
Interestingly, the game only allows players the ability to use seven abilities in any given scenario. Players can switch between three ‘roles,’ each with a customizable ability toolbar of 7 abilities. This effectively gives players a total of 21 powers to use when switching between one of their three stances, although switching stances comes with a yet to be determined cooldown. What this effectively does is allows players to break out of the one-character one-role cliché, and it doesn’t clutter up combat with 50+ skills.
Minuses: Clunky and not-yet-terribly informative UI, some repetitious content early on
All in all, Champions Online is shaping up to be a solid MMORPG, even if it is in beta, and for anyone interested in non-stop action and incredible character development depth, I’d highly suggest this beautiful MMORPG.
Slate’s published an article on the whole Mission Architect / farming foofoorah. Not much new news here, but a decent analysis.
The face-off underscores an iron law of MMO play: Give participants the tools to mold a game into an ideal form, and they’ll quickly use them to generate so-called min-max exploits that produce the fastest possible experience or in-game wealth for the least effort possible.
Free to play the game as they like, players frequently make choices that ruin the fun. It’s an irony that can prove death to game publishers: Far from loving their liberty, players seem to quickly bore of the “ideal” games they’ve created for themselves and quit early.
The article gets a bit apocalyptic over what the undefined (and unpredictable) crack-down on AE farming might mean to CoX — if people will leave an “unfair” situation once other super-hero MMORPGs come online. I don’t think that’s the worry. Instead, I think AE was a tremendous opportunity to instill some new life into CoX (steady new content and QoL improvements notwithstanding). Unfortunately, the flood of farming has turned a lot of potentially creative folks off of the Mission Architect (too little signal to noise), and the PLers, who are bearing the brunt of the crackdown, were the folks most likely to jump ship anyway,
Because of the folks “racing to the bottom,” and the Devs inability to predict or prevent them before the fact, one of CoX’s best chances for some serious reinvigoration may have been lost.
In a flurry of “RTFWS” inspiration, I actually started reading the material at the CO site. The background on heroes and villains demonstrate that they plan on drawin heavily from the already-established Champs universe, which should be all to the good.
The Dev Blog has a wide array of info, all sort of muddled together. Nothing worrisome read yet — the more generic (non-class) bundling of powers sounds promising.
I’m actually looking forward to this, even if it’s been pushed back from July to September.
Watching Margie play LotRO last night during the stress test reminded me of everything I loved and didn’t love about the game. (The comment above was hers, by the way, playing her “hot elf ranger chick with a bow” Frellian as I headed upstairs for bed.)
Big plus: the setting is still stunning, a beautiful and thoughtful rendering of Middle Earth. If you were going to make a LotRO MMO, it would be hard to craft it better than this.
Biggest minus: a lot of running around; still a lot of mining (harvesting, pruning, digging, skinning) resources; a lot of wild animals killed to get “a scrap of dirty hide,” “a tongue,” “a claw,” etc. Grand and epic, not so much.
Margie did show me some of the new mapping functions that make it a lot easier to find where your quest is located. I’m sure there are other QoL improvements, from what Doyce has written. But as I watched Margie, after hours of playing, still stopping by each bush, struggled to make sure she had her axe active vs. her hoe, and harvest off some wood for this and that, it still felt more like Starcraft than LotRO.
Not feeling any great compulsion to re-up. I dinged Molly Morningstar up to 24 on CoH and had a blast with it (literally, as I grabbed a pretty nasty Mental cone power to go with all of her Fire AoE attacks). We had a very good team, led by an excellent tank, which is just what Molly needs (keep the aggro off of me and gather all the baddies in one spot).
The LotRO stress test, btw, appears to have been pretty stressful, as both Margie and Avocet complained of major lag, especially earlier in the evening. That’s what they were trying to test for, of course, so I guess it was successful. No fabulous prize awarded to Margie, alas.
Margie’s downloaded the trial for LotRO for the Stress Test contest going on tonight (whilst I’m out karatifying).
I’ve asked her to let me know (or comment here, for that matter) how the gameplay feels after being gone from LotRO so long.
Duh. Not sure how I missed this during the conversion to WordPress, but I’ve (re)enabled the “subscribe to comments” functionality here.
Any subscriptions from the Movable Type version of the blog are, unfortunately, lost. Not that we get a lot of backchat on old threads, of course, but …
A clever tactic by the LotRO crew — offer prizes for folks who sign in for a special “stress test” session on Thursday night. Well played — I’ll look forward to hear how it goes.
Okay, this looks like it will be more cool (or less lame) than you’d think. Though I’d still like a “map” emote that I can be looking at as I come up. “Shoulda taken a left turn at Albuquerque …”
But not much. Instead, we get a short FAQ, in which we learn:
#2 makes sense — but I have the aesthetic feeling that there should be some sort of cost in changing — and even moreso in changing back. It shouldn’t be purely mechanical. There ought to be “a price to pay.”
We’ll see.
An interesting and lengthy article by Eric on Elder Game (cited by BoingBoing, via Ginny) on the experience of CoX and user-generated content. Bottom line — Paragon ought to have known this was going to have problems, from past times when it’s been tried.
When designers would bring up this feature (and yes, it’s been brought up on every game I’ve worked on), the veteran designers would tell them, “That’s going to backfire tremendously. People will exploit it to make the easiest possible missions, and you won’t like the results.” This is always countered by some variety of “you can’t possibly know that for sure!” But actually, working on a live team teaches that lesson very quickly. From AC2, I learned:
- Players subconsciously calculate the cost-to-benefit ratio of content when deciding if it’s fun. For most MMO players, more reward = more fun. (This is a bitch of a lesson to learn, too. “My custom-scripted quest was so incredibly cool! Why aren’t players doing the quest? Well, yes, the reward was a little sub-par, but so what? You’re telling me they aren’t playing it because of THAT? Players can’t be THAT shallow!” Ha ha, newb.)
- Players aren’t objective reviewers. If you ask them to grade content, they will grade more rewarding content higher than other content even if it isn’t as good by other metrics (like plot, writing, annoyance factor, or originality).
- Many players spend incredible amounts of time finding ways to min-max the system so they can get more power for less effort. That’s part of the fun for many players. So there are tens of thousands of people actively looking for mistakes, loopholes, and gray areas in your game. All the time.
“Yes yes,” the other designers would say, “those lessons from the live team are interesting, but that isn’t exactly the same situation as user-created content, is it? Nobody can say for sure if user-created quests are problematic.” Maybe, just maybe, users could be convinced to grade content fairly. Maybe they would discover how fun it is to run really well-plotted quests instead of just trying to level up as fast as possible. Maybe players can change their stripes. Nope. MMORPG players are as predictable as the sunrise.
As the article continues, as soon as Mission Architect came out, people were coming up with min-maxed systems. The Devs have since come out to try to stop it, by punishing “cheaty” content — but then the issue becomes defining that. (In many ways it’s like managing a forum or mailing list and define what type of content violates the terms of conduct and what doesn’t.)
The Devs have decided not to define what is cheaty and what is not, causing a “chilling effect” by deliberately not creating clear guidelines beyond the vague “Disregard for the risk and/or time to reward ratio.”
This is startlingly unhelpful to people trying to figure out how to make ban-safe, but fun, content. To keep this fiasco from chilling the buzz, they need to publish guidelines about what is and isn’t “fair”, or better yet, code this fairness into their tools. As I write this, pick-up groups are running user-generated quests consisting of nothing but max-level boss monsters, so that doesn’t seem to be “unfair”… of course, since there’s no guidelines, who knows if those quests are about to get banned? Since deletion only happens after an “abusive” quest is reported to customer service, it could just be a matter of time before any quest you play gets banned and your hard work gets reversed. Worse yet, since the rules are secret and enforced by numerous people, it is very likely that they will be enforced semi-arbitrarily, and will tend to become more aggressive over time.
Worse, it’s not clear that the enforcement itself will clear, either. What lessons will actually be learned, how clear will the feedback be, etc. And how clearly will it be reported? “I had a friend of a friend who got banned …”
More importantly, the author says, this won’t resolve the problem, because players will always design content to maximize gain at minimized risk. Unless the tools lock that down intrinsically, there will be distortions of the risk/time : reward ratio, and the Devs will be unhappy. Throwing internal staff at the problem to review all content is hardly cost-effective (nor useful for players). And, of course, the more attention they have to pay to this, the greater the opportunity costs for other content.
In the end, it may (sadly) turn out that Mission Architect is as big a white elephant (and real estate eyesore) as the Arenas — used by a small population, but a tribute to how what people say they want (and how the Devs decide is best to give it to them) don’t always work out as planned … especially if lessons of the past are ignored.
Oops.
For some CoX subscribers who were watching their emails last night, a little something came through …
Paragon Studios™ is proud to officially announce the next City of Heroes® expansion, City of Heroes Going Rogue™! This will be the first major expansion for the City of Heroes franchise since the launch of City of Villains® in 2005.
Praetoria, a utopian mirror to our own world, hides a dark secret. Exploring this mysterious alternate earth, the heroes and villains of this world feel an uneasiness of doubt creep over them. Loyalties are questioned. Choices are made. Lines are drawn. As they search for the truth behind Emperor Cole and his Praetorian guard, brutal foes and fierce allies emerge, turning this once blissful paradise into a battle ground.
City of Heroes Going Rogue officially opens the “mirror universe” of Praetoria and an all-new alignment system that explores the shades of gray that lie between Heroes and Villains. For the first time, Hero characters can become Villains and vice versa, enabling Heroes to cross over to the Rogue Isles™ and Villains to experience Paragon City™.
For more information, read the official press release and check out our new Going Rogue website to view the announcement trailer and register for the latest news and updates for City of Heroes Going Rogue.
The web page link is still up, but the announcement was dubbed premature and the press release is MIA. Speculation and thought run rampant on the subject however. My initial reactions?
Well, first, people have been clamoring for being able to run both Blue and Red power sets together for a long time. Earlier speculation had some sort of a conversion process — where a hero would turn villainous (and move to CoV setting), or a villain heroic (move to CoH), perhaps around some sort of particular mission arc.
Instead, it sounds like they are creating a whole new setting — Praetoria — to house both moral ambiguity and, presumably, both Blue and Red side powers. That’s a little odd — do we really need to be pulling people away from the Paragon and Rogue Isles maps? Does having a new setting invalidate the legitimate (and time-honored) storyline of heroes fallen or villains redeemed?
We don’t know much about the metastory or how folks get there. Will this be someplace you can go some time during your career, or do you start characters there? If the former, what’s the mechanism for transfer, and is it reversible? In other words, is Praetoria a third new game locale to split up the CoX population, or a new meta-zone that people can enter and leave? The email leaves open the possibility of the former, but doesn’t make it certain.
Further, the trailer at the website makes this sound more like an event than a simple new location — is Praetoria going to invade? And how will that be part of the “moral ambiguity” story arc over time?
New maps and new story are good. I look forward to hearing more.
Regardless of what happens going forward with the AE system, I’m pleased I got a couple of characters (Al McGordo and Tyger-Tyger) over the hump into their 20s, making for a bit more fun play.
I’ve been trying to think of a good way that the Devs could create some sort of shortcut to let folks start at higher levels. Actually, it’s the 10-13, or even 10-19 range that’s the most problematic, I think. A way to demonstrate that you know what you’re doing, and therefore should be allowed to start play at a higher level would be a good way to start — but then that runs into meta-game issues of reducing the veteran pool among low-level players, which hurts the game long-run.
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