Still more I13 stuff

The Massively Interview with Posi: Brian Clayton and Matt Miller on Power and Responsibility in City of Heroes – Massively 

(I’m not duplicating stuff I’ve already covered in detail in the previous couple of posts.)

The Merit System

Massively: The Merit System rewards were previously announced for Issue 13, and you’re still going to be pushing forward with that. We wanted to ask you about the Hamidon, and whether that’s been given a large merit reward? Also, whether players will be getting merits for doing Ouroboros flashback arc missions?

Matt Miller: Players will be getting merits for doing Ouroboros flashback stuff, as well as for story arcs – any story arc in the game that they complete. As for the Hamidon, yes, they have a choice between getting a Hamidon enhancement or getting the Merit reward. I don’t know how many Merits that is, but I will say that all the Merit reward values are based on the datamines we did on basically how quickly players typically did these things. So it really became a ‘time versus reward’ mechanism. So the really fast stuff gets a small amount of rewards, whereas the really long stuff gets a larger amount of rewards.

Massively: What kind of things are players going to be able to spend their Merits on?

Matt Miller: Basically, the cool stuff that they’re striving to attain by repeating these missions over and over again, like Invention recipes, the harder-to-get Enhancements, things like that.

My thought? Meh. I mean, actually this is a plus and an encouragement to do arcs (vs police band missions), but anything that adds additional complexity to the marketplace in CoX is not a step in the right directoin.

Day Jobs and Costumes

Massively: For Day Jobs, what kind of costumes are we going to be seeing when that system goes into the game with Issue 13?

Matt Miller: So we’ve had Jay working on a lot of civilian clothing for this feature. He’s done a myriad of different suits, from single-breasted, double-breasted, two, three and four-button, bolo ties, normal ties, bow ties, pinstripe – you know, striped suits, like many different varieties of that… sweaters, sweater vests, and then the police uniforms. We’ve got a ton of different police uniforms. We’re even including a really cool police belt, with all the accoutrements on that. I can see a lot of players just grabbing that and putting it on their tech characters and gadget characters, just because it looks so cool.

Actually, the best thing about this is that it opens up more civilian costumes — something that CoX has lagged at. A surprising number of my alts aren’t elaborately dressed power armor sorts, but just like t hang out in normal clothing. And, heck, Psi-clone could use a few new suits in his closet …

The Leveling Pact

[…]
Matt Miller: It’s definitely one of those features that came to us based on a lot of feedback we had from our players, and especially our friends who are playing the game. They came to us and said ‘You know, I like playing the game, and I like the sidekicking system, but I’m getting to a point where my friends are so far outleveling me that they don’t want to exemplar down and do my stuff because they’ve already done it before. Is there any way that we can stay more in synch?’

So we had this idea for the Leveling Pact: essentially splitting each character’s XP gain directly in half and just distributing it across two characters whether they’re offline or online. And we said: ‘You know what? There’s a system here. This is a workable system. This is really innovative, and this is taking a new step in sidekicking, making sure that you and your friend are always able to play the game together, and will always be the same level.’

Massively: So basically the main character’s XP gain is halved, and the other part is given to the buddy?

Matt Miller: Yeah, basically both characters when they earn XP, they go through all the calculations for earning XP – how much they’re supposed to get, based on their team size, what they defeated – every calculation possible in the game, and at the very end it’s divided in two and each person in the pact gets their share.

Massively: So the obvious question there, and Brian, this might be more to you, is from a business standpoint, this seems like it might be a dangerous ground to walk for powerleveling services. Because there’s some obvious ways that this could be taken advantage of by those kinds of guys. Is that a concern for the company?

Brian Clayton: Sure. I mean, it’s absolutely a concern. It’s a concern that we deal with today, without the system. Really, what we’re trying to do is build opportunities for our players to play the games in the way they want to. We’ll continue to enforce our policies, and do everything we can to mitigate powerleveling services and things like that. But more importantly, this is a feature that our customers have been asking for, and it’s a feature that we want to provide them with. Arguably, you could say we’re making it easier for some of these powerleveling services, but at the same time we’re probably improving the grouping experience for a substantial amount of our customers.

Matt Miller: There’s actually less incentive now to use a powerleveling service, because now instead of paying someone to powerlevel my guy, I can actually have my friend play… and I’m not giving up my play time to some other service. I actually get to play whenever I want to on my character. And my friend gets to play whenever he wants to on his character, and we’re both leveling at the same rate.

I continue to think this is awesome. And the PLing service? Yeah, I suppose — though it’s going to take a PLing service twice as long to LP me up to whatever than it would for them to simply take over my character for the week.

Alternate Builds

Massively:There’s a ton of new features that you guys are putting in here to go along with the leveling pact and to make up for Architect being moved over a little bit. Can you talk about multi-builds a little bit? Is there going to be a minimum level after which the feature’s going to become available?

Matt Miller: Yeah, I believe it’s level 10. We’re going to be experimenting with it in Closed Beta and seeing where’s a good point to introduce this concept. Because it is a fairly complex concept and we don’t want the new players to have to deal with it right away, at level 1! It’s around 10 or 15, when you pretty much know how your character’s playing, and an alternate build would probably be of actual benefit to you.

Basically, what it is is you get to create a new character, the same level and archetype and powersets as your other character, and you can switch between them. You get a respec that doesn’t actually change your main set of powers, but you level up that character, you pick where the slots go, you pick what powers you want, you slot those with Enhancements, and that’s your alternate build.

Massively: So basically you create the character, and he has the archetype and he has the power selections that he has when you make the character, but then you can switch what powers you have selected over the course of your career at a specific NPC, right?

Matt Miller: Yep!

I don’t see using this much, but I think the implications for PvP/PvE builds is massive.

Base Changes

[…]
Matt Miller: One of the first things coming for base changes is going to be in Issue 13, and that is a repricing for a lot of things that supergroups can purchase for their bases. We’re lowering a lot of the Prestige costs on not only rooms and base plot sizes, but for items as well, to make them more affordable. We have a lot of datamining now. We know exactly what plot sizes and rooms supergroups can afford. And so we’re going through and we’re making sure that more supergroups can afford those cooler rooms and those cooler base items, and things like that.

And in addition, one of the things we’re doing is we’re getting rid of the Base Salvage out of the game, because a lot of the players were getting confused with the Invention Salvage, since they both get the same kind of message. Players get excited when they get Invention Salvage, and then they get disappointed when they find out it was only Base Salvage, especially if they don’t have a supergroup or their supergroup doesn’t really need the Base Salvage any more. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to get rid of the Base Salvage, and just make everything that’s currently craftable in the bases from salvage, craftable through that Invention Salvage as well.

I would also expect this would raise the price of Invention Salvage, since it’s now used for both. But, ultimately, it simplifies the marketplace, which is a good thing.

In other info in the article: more Midnight Club / Cimaroa content in I13, big story arc bits in I15, and more research ongoing into “switching sides” but no announced issue.