Author: admin

CoX is going MacOS!

Today, October 30th, 2008, NCsoft announced a partnership with TransGaming, Inc. to bring the award-winning City of Heroes franchise to the Apple® Macintosh® computer platform for the company’s western territories. The Mac version will be available for public beta testing with the release of the game’s thirteenth free expansion, Issue 13: Power and Responsibility this fall. The official launch of the Macintosh version is planned to follow shortly thereafter via a special digital-only edition.

 

You can sign up for the Beta here.

Mac users will get some interesting bennies (which will eventually be available for purchase by other players):

Yes, just like the Good vs. Evil edition of the game, the Macintosh version will include some special in-game items, including:

• Mission Teleporter Power – Players can save time and get right into the action by teleporting directly to their active mission.
• Exclusive Valkyrie Costume set – Costume pieces include two varieties of wings, a cape, a skirt/kilt, pants, boots, shoulders, chest, gloves, belts, and helmet with multiple details.

These items will be available separately for purchase in early 2009 for customers who are not playing on a Mac. We’ll have further details of these exciting options, including screenshots, in the near future. 

 

Wow. I’d pay money for a Mission Teleporter. Especially if it bridges zones.

(via Margie)

I’ve been using convenient RSS feeds at unseen.net for the CoX Dev Digest (RSS) and the Community Digest (RSS) that send items whenever a red name posts. Alas, they seem to have stopped working, so I have to go back to the old-fashioned method of (gasp!)looking at the actual pages. Bleah.

Hopefully the new forums will have some feature like this, or someone will develop it.

Actually, quitting will start your day job. Current news on the Day Job feature coming in I13.

Day Jobs, a new feature for City of Heroes, rewards players even when they aren’t playing the game. It’s called offline character progression and while other games have done this before, City of Heroes takes it to a whole new level. Simply put, Day Jobs reward players with additional powers and benefits when they log back in. This also gives characters greater depth by allowing them to flesh out their identities and back-stories. Our goal was to create a robust system that benefits players now as much as possible while also allowing the system to grow with future content updates.

While I’ve seen other games provide slowed XP advancement (or credit toward same) while offline, this is the first game I’m aware of that adds additional powers and goodies through it, let alone based on location. 

The Day Job system allows players to log out from a specific location (like a hospital or vault) and when they return to play, after an extended log out period, they will gain a temporary power or some other benefit. All of the benefits granted from Day Jobs, other than badges and accolades (see below) are temporary or have a certain number of uses before they expire. However, each time a character logs out from the same area, the corresponding benefits are replenished. Most rewards take 10 days of logged out time to reach the maximum benefit.

Most of my characters tend to be logged out for 10 days at a time, at least, except for a few in current rotation. 

When characters are logged out from a designated location (consecutively or non-consecutively) for a total of 30 days they will earn a badge associated with the corresponding Day Job. This will result in additional benefits. Once a badge is earned, the rate at which characters accumulate benefits, and even the potency of them increase!

Again, 30 days doesn’t seem to be a problem for me. Though it does make me think I need to get my less active toons on and move them to a location I want.

Below is a list of most, but not all, of the Day Jobs available in Issue 13: Power and Responsibility:

Hero Day Jobs 

Day Job Name	Log Out Location	Benefit
City Official	City Hall (Atlas Park)	Influence Bonus upon mission complete.
Law Enforcer	Police Stations	Experience Bonus upon mission complete
Commuter	Train Stations	Travel speed bonus.
Shop Keeper	Store Lobbies	Enhancement drop on mission complete.
Intern	Portal Corp Lobbies	Large Inspiration upon mission complete.
Caregiver	Hospital Lobbies	Out of combat regeneration bonus.
Professor	Inside Universities	Random tech salvage drop upon mission complete.
Midnighter	Inside the Midnighter’s Club	Random arcane salvage drop upon mission complete.
Banker	Inside a Vault	Influence Bonus upon mission complete.
Clubber	Pocket D	Out of combat recovery bonus.
Fashion Designer	Tailor Lobbies	Coupons that will grant a discount at the tailor.
Mortician	Graveyards	XP Debt Protection

 

 

Villain Day Jobs 

Day Job Name	Log Out Location	Benefit
Demagogue	Arachnos Building (Marconeville, Port Oakes)	Influence Bonus upon mission complete.
Arachnos Agent	Arachnos Bases and Arachnos Controlled areas.	Experience Bonus upon mission complete
Pilot	Near Black Helicopters	Travel speed bonus.
Smuggler	Ferry Docks	Enhancement drop on mission complete.
Crey Employee	Crey Industries Building in Nerva Archipelago	Large Inspiration upon mission complete.
Pain Specialist	Hospital Lobbies	Out of combat regeneration bonus.
Professor	Inside Universities	Random tech salvage drop upon mission complete.
Midnighter	Inside the Midnighter’s Club	Random arcane salvage drop upon mission complete.
Thief	Inside a Vault	Influence Bonus upon mission complete.
Clubber	Pocket D	Out of combat recovery bonus.
Fashion Designer	Tailor Lobbies	Coupons that will grant a discount at the tailor.
Mortician	Graveyards	XP Debt Protection

 

Those all look fun. I note it doesn’t say what you get for hanging out at Wentworths …

An Accolade is obtained by earning two Day Job badges that work in conjunction with one another. In other words, earning multiple badges unlock Accolades. These Accolades will grant an even more enhanced set of powers and benefits. Additional ‘charges’ can also be earned for your Day Job Accolade powers by logging off from either of the areas associated with the two badges that unlocked the Accolade.

Okay, this is starting to sound like work (pun not intended).

Below is a list of some, but not all, of the Day Job Accolades available in Issue 13: Power and Responsibility:

 

Hero Day Job Accolades 

Day Job Accolade	Day Job #1	Day Job #2	Benefit
Police Chief	Law Enforcer	City Official	Baton Power: Melee Minor DMG (Smashing) For Stun.
Security Chief	Law Enforcer	Banker	Tear Gas: Ranged AoE Hold.
Scientist	Professor	Intern	Sleep Gas: Ranged AoE Sleep.
Physician	Professor	Caregiver	Ally Resurrect
Alchemist	Caregiver	Midnighter	Ally Heal

 

 

Villain Day Job Accolades 

Day Job Accolade	Day Job #1	Day Job #2	Benefit
Web Weaver	Arachnos Agent	Demagogue	Web Grenade: Ranged Foe Immobilize, \-Rech, \-Fly, \-Speed
Black Ops	Arachnos Agent	Thief	Smoke Grenade: Ranged AOE Foe \-Perception, \-To Hit
Crey Scientist	Pain Specialist	Crey Employee	Sleep Gas: Ranged AoE Sleep.
Physician	Professor	Pain Specialist	Ally Resurrect
Alchemist	Pain Specialist	Midnighter	Ally Heal

 

Note: These are only some of the available Accolades. When players obtain Day Job badges, they unlock information about which Day Jobs to collect next in order to earn the associated Accolade(s).

Okay, nothing terribly special there. Well, maybe an Ally Rez would be handy.

In addition to all of the Day Jobs, every character is “On Patrol” after they log out of the game. When players log back into Paragon City or the Rogue Isles they will gain 1 bar of double experience (when defeating enemies) for every 24 hours they are logged out. A player can earn up to 10 bars of double experience this way. Double experience is shown as a blue portion of your experience bar. One thing to note is that if a player has any experience debt, the debt will be removed first before any double experience is applied.

If your character has a number of bars of double experience that exceeds the number of experience bars you need to level up, then this double experience will carry over to the next security/threat level.

It wasn’t originally clear when first announced that this would be automatic for everyone. This is how a number of other MMOs do it, and it’s a nice feature.

 

When exploring both Paragon City and the Rogue Isles you will encounter several Day Job locations. You’ll know you’re in one when you see a power icon under your health bar that explains what Day Job you will work towards by logging off in that location.

Try visiting a hospital, where you will earn the Caregiver (Pain Specialist if you’re a villain) Day Job. You’ll notice a power icon that when moused over will state “Day Job: Caregiver.” Logging out from this location will earn you credit toward the Caregiver Day Job badge. When you log back in you’ll gain an out of combat regeneration bonus. Once you’ve logged out in the Hospital for a total of 30 days (consecutively or non-consecutively) or more you’ll earn the Caregiver badge and will receive an even more powerful regeneration bonus when you log out at this location from here on out.

Once you have earned the Caregiver badge you will find a hint for how to earn the Physician accolade by first earning the Professor badge. To earn the Professor Day Job badge, you will need to log out from the University for 30 (consecutive or non-consecutive) days. After an extended log out period, the Professor Day Job will grant you a random piece of tech salvage upon mission completion. This bonus will take 10 days of log out time to earn 2 hours worth of this bonus. However, once you earn the Professor badge you only need to be logged out 8 days to earn the 2 hour benefit instead of 10. 

Once you own both the Professor and Caregiver badges you will unlock the Physician Accolade. With this Accolade you will be able to earn ‘charges’ for a power that revives defeated allies by logging out from (and back in to) either a University or a Hospital. You will gain the Day Job benefits for both this Accolade and the Day Job benefit associated with the area. Nice benefits! 

The badges and even bonus powers aren’t all that special (not enough to always run back to the hospital to sign off, though that would be a fun IC/RP touch). But it’s still a fun new feature.

All in all, we’re really excited about this new feature for our game. By balancing your time in and out of the game, you’ll get unique rewards that you wouldn’t otherwise attain. When you are ready to log back in and kick some villain or hero butt… we’ll be there waiting for you, and you’ll still be powerful enough to do just that. And with the addition of our Day Job themed costume pieces you can even dress appropriately!

 

At one point, it sounded like the costume pieces only became unlocked once you had gotten the badges. Honestly, those might be of more interest than some of the powers, since you can never have enough non-spandex costume bits.

Quoth Castle (plus preface):

Preface: Issue 13: Power and Responsibility includes a whole host of development. Not only are there significant new features, but there is also ongoing development to the existing game. A big part of the game is the balance of all the Archetypes, their respective power sets and how they compare. Maintaining a level of equity between everything is a continual goal.

For what it’s worth, equity (or parity) is important, but not paramount. It’s a means to an end — having fun.

In this article, NCsoft NorCal Senior Designer Floyd “Castle” Grubb gives us the scoop on some proposed powers changes that will be in testing with Issue 13. Please keep in mind that there is still the entire testing and revision process to go through with these changes. The team is excited to see how these refinements stand up to player feedback, datamining, and the beta process.

Introduction

For Issue 13, we have a rather wide selection of PvE (Player vs. Environment) related powers changes. These changes focus on either Quality of Life concerns or on powers which were not quite in Balance with others. Below is a breakdown of what we are doing, with the aim to provide insight into the thought process behind it.

I’ll note that this seems to be a higher level of explanation than we’ve seen in the past. Hmmmm … I’m worried.

Energy Aura

Let’s start with Energy Aura for Brutes and Stalkers. Energy Aura has had a poor reputation from the start, and while it is “balanced” with the other protective powersets using the original metrics, it has been shown that those metrics did not take certain key factors into consideration – namely Regeneration and Healing effects. Energy Aura lacked any sort of mechanic which could increase the Health or Regeneration Rate of the character, and did it have any active method of restoring Health to the character using these powers. Additionally, the set had more protection holes than others. To address these issues, the following changes are being made:

– Energy Protection: This power gained a 1.25 scale Toxic damage resist attribute for Brutes and a 1.00 scale Toxic damage resist attribute for Stalkers. Energy Aura, being a typed defense set, had no protection against these types of attacks unless they were ‘packaged’ with a lethal attack of some sort.

– Energy Drain: Added a 2 scale self heal to each target affected by this power. Un-slotted, the player will recover 2% of their maximum HP per target affected. This can be enhanced to up to about 4% per target. This change was made to offer the power set some minor healing ability to increase their survivability but not offer an overwhelming heal.

I’m not sure that’s enough to answer the complaints about the power — but it can’t hurt.

Invulnerability

Invulnerability has a few issues, mainly stemming from lack of special resistances and “weak” power choices. Here are the changes that are being made:

– Unyielding: We removed the Defense Debuff from this power. While we still believe it fit thematically, the impact on low level characters was more severe than desired.

– Invincibility: Reduce per target Defense Buff to from scale 0.15 to scale 0.1. The overall result of this and the Unyielding change is, if you have the maximum number of targets in this powers radius, you have the same protection as from Issue 12, but if you have fewer targets, your net defense is higher.

– Resist Physical Damage: Added 25% Defense Debuff Resistance. Increased damage resistance scale from 0.75 to 1.00.

– Tough Hide: Added 25% Defense Debuff Resistance.

– Resist Energies: Added 25% Endurance Debuff Resistance. Increased damage resistance scale from 0.75 to 1.00.

– Resist Elements: Added 20% Movement Slow Resistance. Increased damage resistance scale from 0.75 to 1.00.

Huh. Those actually sound like nice positive tweaks.

Kheldians

Peacebringers and Warshades, as Archetypes, have an interesting history and reputation among players. It seems as if no one is neutral about them — they are either loved or hated. This isn’t much of a surprise; they were always meant to require more player decision making and compromise than the base Archetypes. However, certain technological restrictions combined with the “facts” of high level play ultimately proved that the Kheldians were even harder than originally expected. With Issue 12’s introduction of the Villain Epic Archetypes, we took some time to re-evaluate where the Kheldians were and what we wanted to do with them. Here is what we are planning:

– Cosmic Balance: This power now functions while shapeshifted — Dwarf and Nova forms gain the same benefits as human form.

– Dark Sustenance: This power now functions while shapeshifted — Dwarf and Nova forms gain the same benefits as human form.

– Gleaming Bolt, Glinting Eye, Gleaming Blast, Luminous Detonation, Shadow Bolt, Ebon Eye, Gravimetric Snare, Shadow Blast and Dark Matter Detonation: Increased base Range to 80′. This makes Human form Kheldians ranged capabilities more useful overall. The 80′ range meshes more evenly with other Ranged AT’s capabilities.

– Peacebringer AT Multipliers: increased Human form Melee Damage multiple to 0.85, increased Human form Range Damage multiple to 0.8 and increased Dwarf Form Melee Damage multiple to 1.0.

– Warshade AT Multipliers: increased Human form Melee Damage multiple to 0.85, increased Human form Range Damage multiple to 0.8 and increased Dwarf Form Melee Damage multiple to 1.0.

– Dwarf Form: You may now shift into Dwarf Form even while Held, Slept or Stunned.

I’ve never successfully done much with Kheldians, but this all sounds pretty helpful.

Toggle Powers

One important additional piece of development to mention, that is especially relevant to Kheldians and their toggle powers is: in Issue 13, Toggles are no longer shut off due to Hold, Sleep or Disorient effects. This is a major gameplay change, and it is not restricted to Kheldians, but instead applies to all non-offensive player toggles. As part of changes in Issue 13, when a player is affected by a hold, sleep or stun, any toggle power they are running will continue and will still draw endurance from the character. However, some or all of its effects may be suppressed until such time as the hold, sleep or stun is removed. For example, if you are held while in Black Dwarf form, all of your Damage Resistance values, your recovery bonus and knockback protection are suppressed, while your hold, stun, sleep, immobilize and confuse protections remain in effect. Monitoring your stats with the “Real Numbers” tool is a good way to check which aspects of a toggle are suppressed and which are not.

Huh. That’s net a nice QoL advantage. Sure, endurance loss and some suppression, but no constantly having to re-up your toggles after you’re mezzed? Priceless!

Note that Castle also noted that “If the toggle affects anyone but the caster, it does not get the protection. This is one of the key things I’ll be watching on the training room — I know there are rough spots in it, and want to iron those out before Live.” But he also notes “Toggles that affect self and allies (ie: Leadership, Dispersion Bubble) gain the same protection.”

And also: “If the Hold doesn’t overcome the Fly attribute, you will simply take a nap in mid air.”

War Mace

An ongoing project over the last several issues has been bringing War Mace up to performance par with other powersets. The last set of changes got us close, but still not to where we want to be. Here are the changes:

– Clobber: Reduced Recharge Time to 16 seconds and alter damage scale and endurance costs to match using the standard formula. This means it it now a pretty hard hitting attack, with a damage scale of 2.29 and a base endurance cost of 15.18. Since this is now classified as a Damage power rather than a control power, the base duration of the Stun effect was reduced from scale 10 to scale 5.

– Shatter: Reduced Max Targets Hit from 10 to 5.

– Crowd Control: Increased Max Targets Hit from 5 to 10.

Margie can speak better to this, having run Hildy up to 50. It sounds good.

Misc

There are numerous smaller changes going into Issue 13. While you all will get to see the final product in what makes it into the patch notes, there are a few other changes I want to let you know about.

– Fiery Aura Temperature Protection: Now provides 20% movement reduction protection.

– Dark Melee Midnight Grasp: This power has been rebalanced to provide the majority of it’s damage as a front loaded sum (scale 2.21), followed by a shorter, small damage DOT. Overall damage has increased, as has the amount of damage done on a ‘Critical.’

One of Amorpha’s favorite powers. Sounds more favorite now.

– Energy Melee Barrage: We increased the effectiveness of this power by increasing Damage per Activation. We increased Recharge time from 2 seconds to 6 seconds and change the damage and endurance costs accordingly. The smashing component of the damage is now 2 hits of scale 0.5 damage, and the energy portion is now 2 hits of scale 0.16 damage for a combined scale 1.32 damage.

I’ve used this on a couple of characters, like Eliza Dee.  More damage is good, of course. 

These are the highlights, and there are several other changes which are still in a state of flux (stalkers Claws, for instance.) I hope you all like the changes. We are really looking forward for this all to hit the Training Room so you folks can bang on them and tell us how the changes feel! Your feedback is critical for these and other changes that we make to the game.

So … not much nerfy here in the way of powers changes.

Another I13 interview, this one at Ten Ton Hammer. Most is stuff recapped before, but a few items stood out.

Ten Ton Hammer: Can you talk about the power rebalancing at all? How are you balancing you PvP and PvE powers? 

Matt: One of the things when we started the studio was to make hires in the “Powers” department. Not only do we have more people to work on the powers, but we can also now take a fine-toothed comb to the power system and get some data mining and cold hard facts on the powers and how they’re being used.

To start, we rebalanced the Patron powers and the Epic powers that villains and heroes get so they’re more in line with each other. We looked at what players were picking more often and changed some powers completely and pruned some powers.

In addition, we wanted to make sure PvP remained fun. We were getting into a situation with the games because PvP was getting less and less fun because of how some powers interacted with players. Back then, we couldn’t adjust the powers without having an adjustment made in PvE as well. Basically, we got more people, had more code time, and created a new technology system so that when you’re in a PvP zone some powers act very differently than what they do in PvE. Hopefully this will bring a more balanced PvP game to the CoX franchise and allow new players to find this enjoyable. 

 

Which makes it sound like the Epic Pool Powers are going to get a bit of love. Which is good, because there are a lot of characters I’ve mapped out where they were pretty much unnecessary, or fairly trivial adds to the build.

In online threads, Castle notes that the precise changes won’t be announced until Beta.

 

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. 
 

Another official page:

---

 

Day Jobs (Offline Character Progression)

Scholar? Caregiver? City Official? Now when players log out of City of Heroes / Villains they’re just getting started! A character’s day job is determined by the actual in-game location from which he or she logs out. If players log out from a University their day job is considered to be a Scholar. If they log out from City Hall they’re a City Official. The benefits are thematically appropriate to the location. For example, a City Official earns extra Influence, a Scholar is granted Salvage, a Caregiver is granted Health Regeneration Buffs, etc.

Once characters have accumulated the required amount of time for each Day Job, they are rewarded with the appropriate Day Job Badge and Title, increasing their “earnings” for that job. Multiple Badges can be combined to unlock Accolades and the ability to accumulate additional new rewards. Almost every location within Paragon City and the Rogue Isles has an associated Day Job, resulting in a wide selection of jobs and rewards!

Dave says: Cool. Yeah, I can imagine folks being unhappy over the non-RP nature of it. Whatever. I think it’s good. 

Multiple Builds

Another character customization option and City of Heroes innovation, Issue 13 delivers the ability to have two different build-outs for each character, including which powers are selected and which Enhancements are slotted. With this feature it will now be possible for all characters to diversify their game experience by visiting any Trainer and switching the entire build of their character to an alternate one. You can use this separate build for whatever you like. If you wish to use different power selections for soloing and groups, you can do that. This even makes it possible to have different IO sets slotted for PVP and PVE. This new system gives characters the added depth and flexibility to tackle any challenge!

Dave says: Excellent idea.  

New Powersets

• Shields – Heft a Shield for Heroic or Villainous Ends! This new powerset brings a classic power to City of Heroes: Shields! Now, you can arm Tankers, Scrappers and Brutes with a powerful shield to protect themselves and their allies.
• Pain Domination – Villains can now bend the power of pain to serve their own ends! Those playing a Corruptor or Mastermind have access to this new powerset. The antithesis of the Hero healing powerset “Empathy,” Pain Domination brings parity between Heroes and Villains with a distinctively evil flair.

Dave says: Pain isn’t someting I’m likely to do; Shields is okay, and I’ll probably try something with it, but it’s not something I’m wildly excited about. 

Leveling Pact

A new innovation to MMOs, this system allows you and a friend to create new characters and have your XP be permanently in sync, whether both characters are online or not. You will always be the same level, even if your friend plays ten times more often than you do! It’s sort of like “Extreme Sidekicking.”

Dave says: Excellent idea. 

The Merit Rewards System

A new game system that allows players to earn tokens by completing Trials, Task Forces, Strike Forces, Raids, etc. The most challenging and time consuming tasks grant the most reward tokens, which can be redeemed throughout Hero and Villain zones for recipes, enhancements, salvage, costume pieces, badges, inspirations and other game items.

Dave says: Not sure we need another currency / thing to collect. Whatever. 

Villain Patron Power Respec

Villains level 40 and above can respec (re-select) their Patron Powers, offering the same flexibility that heroes are afforded with Ancillary Powers.

Dave says: N/A. 

Supergroup Base Repricing

Base Salvage is being replaced with Invention Salvage and all Base room and item prices are being adjusted to more accessible levels. Remaining base salvage can be traded in for invention salvage, or can continue to be stored in base and personal storage.

Dave says: Simplifying the salvage system can only be a good thing. Making base costs more “accessible” is also a good thing. 

PvE and PvP Powers Rebalancing

More details to come shortly, directly from Powers Designer Floyd “Castle” Grubb.

Dave says: Yay. 

New Cimerora Missions

New Hero and Villain story arcs expand upon the history and lore, and delve into the players and politics of Cimerora.

Dave says: I’ll confess that the Cimerora stuff doesn’t wow me.  

Other features

New Invention Origin Sets, new Costume Sets, Zone Refinements, and more!

Dave says: I have new and other feelings about this, too. 

Official NCSoft news from Positron. It seems that too many folks complained (unjustly, IMO, but …) about not being able to create custom villains/allies in the announced Mission Architect system. So they’re going to add that in — but push back the whole system to I14, in 2009Q1. In the meantime, we get I13 going into beta Real Soon Now with all sorts of keenness:

Issue 13: Power and Responsibility
Issue 13: Power and Responsibility will contain the bulk of features we’ve announced previously, including:
 

• Shield and Pain Domination powersets
• Merit Reward system
• Day Jobs (that include a suite of new costume pieces)
• Additional Cimerora and Midnight Squad mission arcs

In addition, we have some other new exciting features to reveal that will be included in Issue 13: Power and Responsibility. These include:

• Leveling Pact
• Multi-Builds
• PvE & PvP Powers rebalancing
• Villain Patron Power Respec
• Supergroup Base Repricing

Which looks like a fine set of stuff for a new Issue. But its some of the prevoiusly-unannounced bits that have me seriously jonesing:

The Leveling Pact: A new innovation to MMOs, this groundbreaking system allows you and a buddy to create new characters and have your XP be permanently in sync, whether both characters are online or not. You will always be the same level, even if your buddy plays ten times more often than you do! It’s sort of like “Extreme Sidekicking.”

This makes me very excited. As a committed duo-er, there are a lot of ways this could be incredibly fun. Heck, depending on how it’s implemented, I could see being in a “committed duo” with some of my solo characters, without having to worry about leaving my partner behind.

Multi-Builds: Another innovation to City of Heroes, we are delivering the ability to have two different build-outs of each character, including which powers are selected and which Enhancements are slotted. This will now be possible for characters who want to take advantage of it. By visiting any Trainer you can switch the entire build of your character to an alternate one. You can use this separate build for whatever you like. If you wish to use different power selections for soloing and groups, you can do that. This even makes it possible to have different IO sets slotted for PVP and PVE. It’s up to you.

This is another amazingly powerful ability. It flattens the whole “PvE vs PvP” build gap (not something I’ve ever worried about, but something I’ve found annoying to read of). It also has some interesting RP capabilities. And, better yet, it lets you test a character build without having to spend time on the Test server. Excellent!

PvE and PvP Powers Rebalancing: Floyd “Castle” Grubb and the powers designers have been hard at work in finding ways to strike a better balance between the many powers in the game. The scope of what they are doing is too broad to go into details here, but we’re very excited and we’ll share more information soon. Suffice it to say that we know that you don’t want your PvE powers adjusted because of how they play in PvP, so we’re taking a new tact in power balancing with Issue 13.

Welcome news, since the consensus is that most PvE nerfs are due to PvP abuses (and some in the other direction, too). Clearly this is a result of the Multi-Builds thing.

(Note to Posi — it’s “taking a new tack,” not “new tact.”)

Summary
Issue 13 was so big we had to turn it into two releases, Issue 13: Power and Responsibility and Issue 14: Architect. Issue 13 will be going into beta soon and launching this Fall. It will include most of the previously announced features of Issue 13, and then some. Issue 14: Architect will include the full-featured Mission Architect and is scheduled to launch to the live servers in Q1, 2009. I am really looking forward to getting Issue 13 into your hands as soon as possible, and starting off a kick-ass 2009 with the release of Mission Architect.

Very cool. I look forward to hearing more details.

This time it’s Hero 1’s turn:

An Arc being placed in Dev Choice is not how additional content is unlocked for Architects. That’s handled through straight peer review. The better your Arcs, the more stuff you get to put in missions. The amount of stuff we lock on unlock is something we’re going to tweak as time goes on.

So your access to the editor, to make new mssions, becomes more robust and rich as you get whuffie from other players? Hmmm. On the one hand, cool. On the other hand, subject (it would seem) to a lot of abuse.

Dev Choice missions unlock full XP and Influence for an Arc.

Good.

Zombie Man pointed this out, but I feel it needs to be mentioned again. Voting is per account, not character. So, even if everyone in your SG group gives you five stars on an Arc, you still have the other hundred thousand plus players to balance it out.

True enough — but how many votes will it take for a mission to get whatever it is that you get? 

And, to be honest, I’d just as soon not start a new industry in people saying, “Hey, can you vote for my Story Arc?” on Broadcast, or in missions, or whatever.

Players are rewarded for playing, creating and rating Arcs.

Okay, that’s interesting — rewards for playing (beyond XP and inf?), creating (beyond better editing tools?), and rating Arcs? So there’s an incentive to play a lot of player-generated content and rate it (can you only rate it at mission completion?).

Players will be able to publish somewhere around half a dozen or so Arcs up to our Arc server. An Arc is anywhere from one to five missions.

Okay, useful numbers.

There are a number of different categories that created content will fall into.

• Quickplay, displays the highest rated content you haven’t played.
• Dev Choice, displays content that the devs feel best reflects what the Mission Architect can be.
• Hall of Fame, the best of the best voted entirely by the players.

Content that reaches the Hall of Fame level, and potentially even the Dev Choice section, will unlock additional Arc slots for those creators. This is an incentive to create content that the players and the devs enjoy.

Though that does raise the issue of how people find new content in the first place, as visibility of content rises as visibility of content rises.

At any point you can “unpublish” your Arc to free up an additional slot. Arcs that have reached the Hall of Fame or Dev Choice level will be locked, but you’ll have a new slot to create another super cool Arc.

Cut scenes will not be open at launch. As Positron says, “I wouldn’t wish that system on anyone.”

Fair enough.

Stories picked as Dev Choice, will not become canon in our game. If and I mean IF that ever were to happen, it would have to be a pretty big deal.

 I will be interested to see the disclaimers around this system (presumably all content created belongs to the Company).

Players will be able to place multiple objectives within a single mission (boss, defeat, rescue, pet, ambush, etc.). They’ll also be able to weave characters and story through out multiple missions in a single arc. They can even create multiple arcs that build upon each other. Hopefully, for most this is seen as something more than just the simple police/radio missions.

It sounds like it will, indeed, be more — or can be.

And now for the big one. Allowing players to add in their own characters is an obvious direction to take this feature. We’d be stupid not to give it to you guys. It is however non trivial to do so, especially when we start allowing those characters to use player picked powers. So, know that you will be able to do this. It just might not be at the launch of the feature.

Good enough. From what’s already described, there seem to be plenty of possibilities.

In the end, please know that the Mission Architect is designed to allow creative people to tell their stories, while also rewarding those who play these stories. This is the goal we push towards. In the end, it will never be everything to everyone, but it will hopefully be more than enough to more than a few.

Sounds pretty good to me!

Positron on the Mission Architect system (info as revealed at PAX):

Mission Architect is whatever text you enter, on the specific map you call (and we have over 1000 different maps in the game), with AT LEAST one objective, but more likely more, with the ability to have allied NPCs (you want to rescue Statesman in the beginning of the map and have him fight WITH you the rest of the way? Done). There are even some objective types going into mission maker that we didn’t even have access to AS DEVELOPERS until Issue 12. There are over 100 different things you can customize in the story arc, and most of those have multiple choices to pick from.

 

Well, it sounds somewhat multiple-choice, but with lots of areas to work with.

Yes, you will not be able to custom build a character and have them appear. Primarily this is because of the way the AI handles powers. Some powers simply don’t work when in the hands of the AI (Mastermind summoning is one example). One of our goals is to put the ability to take an existing Enemy Boss, and change their costume to one you design. Since those powers and AI have all been pre-programmed this can be done without involving ringing Castle up at 2am to debug the AI on the guy in your custom mission. While this is a stretch goal for launch, we want to get this ability into your hands as soon as possible.

 

Somewhat unfortunate, since one of the questions everyone was asking was whether they could put their own characters into adventures as NPCs. You will also be able to (per this) rename those Enemy Bosses.

You WILL get XP and Inf. during Mission Architect missions. I don’t believe we ever said you wouldn’t. We only said that you won’t get it at the same rate as normal-developer-designed content. Why? Well we have all sorts of COOL stuff coming for you in upcoming issues that doesn’t involve Mission Architect and we’d like you to try that out too (rewarding you for doing so).

 

So XP and Inf, but at a lower rate. That’s a shame, though understandable to avoid farming missions.

You get to choose what contact gives out your Story Arc, picking from a list of all the available contacts in the game. Eventually you’ll have the same “customization” options as the custom bosses.

 

Ah. So I infer that when you go to a contact, s/he will have an option for user-designed content.

As for your limited number of Story Arcs. You will have a limited number of PUBLISHED Arcs, you can have TONS of unpublished arcs you are working on, that are not ready for prime-time. If one of your arcs gets enough positive feedback to get into the Hall of Fame, it “graduates” from being one of your published arcs, freeing up that slot for you to put something else in.

 

So you can create missions as part of a “Story Arc” — with a limit on how many of these arcs you can be building — but if it gets into the “Hall of Fame,” that frees up that slot. Interesting. And per this, one-off missions count as a (one mission) arc.

I’ll confess that one of my concerns over the Hall of Fame is that it’s as likely to be a popularity contest (SG members get an advantage) as anything else.

We are WELL AWARE of the customer service issues involved in the content of the missions. We have all seen the Spore Creature Creator, and we know the TTD ratio on player created content in measured in nanoseconds. We have thought of a LOT of the angles already. Publishing a mission, getting a high rating, then pulling it down and changing the text to something inappropriate is something we take VERY seriously.

 

The question is, how strongly will they monitor it?

Good stuff, though. I think everyone will be playing with this.

 

Commentary / items related:

1. How about a Zookeeper Mastermind … including Rikti Monkey pets!

2. Some hardcore RPers are upset over the “Day Job” I13 feature. “How dare you force my character to be an X when I sign off at Y That’s completely out of character!” Um … okay, so ignore it. Or sign off at a “I’m on Patrol” place.

3. People are speculating about the home-grown Mission stuff for I13, too. How will the Mission Builder be accessed? More importantly, how will the missions themselves be accessed. (My guess for the latter — all those near-useless kiosks out there. At least on the Hero side.)