Seven Heaven and Pulp Fiction

I managed to hit Level 7 in Ingress today, one level below the current level cap.  Which means I now have access to L7 bursters and resonators, which might come in handy someday. Metaproblems with game faction imbalance continue, but patience prevails for the moment. At least long enough to get me to L7.

Of course, I have to double the experience points (AP) for L7 to get to L8.  Sigh.

In honor of the event, I present two PULP SCIENCE FICTION COVERS I created for Ingress, via the Pulp-o-Mizer.

Seriously thinking of getting coffee mugs with these on them.

 

NCSoft to CoH Fanbase: Please stop writing us letters!

NCSoft issued an official press release today to all those City of Heroes fans who’ve been trying to save the game.

Short version: “Happy Hunger Games, and may the odds be ever in your favor!”

Long version:

City of Heroes® Players and Fans,

We wanted to let you know that your voices have been heard and your concerns have been taken into serious consideration. We appreciate the overwhelmingly constructive and positive messages in the emails, notes, and packages you’ve sent in support of the game. It has not been an easy decision for us to close Paragon Studios® and prepare to shut down City of Heroes. We’ve exhausted all options including the selling of the studio and the rights to the City of Heroes intellectual property, but in the end, efforts to do so were not successful. City of Heroes has a special place in all of our hearts, and we want to ensure its reputation and the memories we share for the game end on a high note.

Once again, we will be holding events throughout the process of preparing for the game’s end, and we encourage players and fans of the franchise to join forces and enjoy their time in a game that we’ve enjoyed supporting for more than eight years.

The NCSOFT® Team

Um … yeah. Right. I call shenanigans.

I’d really love to know what NCSoft considers “exhausting all options”. What actual offers of selling Paragon Studio (which has been officially disbanded already) or the CoH IP have been entertained? What actual interest does NCSoft have in selling the property, rather than taking a write-off on their taxes? Whom did they consider, and what offers did they entertain?  What (ballpark, even) would they consider a reasonable offer?

In short, I don’t believe a word of it.  It’s a PR release designed to placate people and convince them to stop sending sad, angry, or demanding letters, to stop getting articles printed in the media, or getting celebrities who enjoy CoH to speak out.  It’s a “Run along, kid, show’s over” message.

I didn’t expect other result, to be honest. But I would have liked some basic honestly and integrity in the message. E.g., “We have decided to consolidate our operations in Korea, rather than have American and European studios. This is a strategic business decision. City of Heroes has been profitable, but maintaining it is a distraction from other games we hope will be much bigger.  That said, we have no interest in passing along the game to anyone else, given that it has been profitable and would only benefit the purchaser. This is not meant to be a slap in the face to loyal players of the game, but the cold, hard, business facts behind this decision.” It wouldn’t earn them any friends, but it might earn them some modicum of respect for being open about it. It would move decisions about being a future NCSoft customer away from emotion and over to simple business decisions.

But instead they blow smoke up our ass.

Well, guess what? Yeah, I’d been still toying with some of the recent and on-the-boards NCSoft games.  But, y’know what? Screw it. I have plenty of other places to put my money and spend my time than on a company that makes a calculated financial decision to destroy a popular and profitable game that I dearly love.

CoH: Signature Story Arc Spoiler Alert (no spoilers)

A wag of my finger to Paragon’s official Twitterer (and their Google Plus person, to a somewhat lesser extent).  Today was the opening day for the fifth installment of the “WHO WILL DIE?” signature story arc in City of Heroes … and there’s @CityOfHeroes twittering away about how you should click the link to see the storytelling decisions behind [REDACTED]’s death, or go over to Massively for their reaction to the Death of [REDACTED]. Ditto, pretty much, for the +CityOfHeroes Google Plus chatterer.

WTF, fellas?

I mean … really?  Spoilers of that sort, of a story so profound and reaching that it was considered a signature story arc and advertised constantly and promises to have dire consequences?

Sure, I’ll play the story multiple times, but I would have liked to have been surprised at least once.

Bad show. Really bad show.

(If you want to read some similar, “WTF, spoilers?!” reactions, with spoilers, check the forums.)

This is what Superspeed should be like

Footage from an under-development (and since-canceled) Flash computer game.

 

High-speed jaunts down the highway! Improbably high leaps! Super-sonic fists! This is what SS should be like. Sadly, CoX only gives you running. And CO doesn’t even give you that if you get aggroed.

*Sigh*

Okay, and I confess on my few SS characters (CoX and CO), I’ve been known to hum the Danny Elfman TV series music, too.

TWITTER IS TEH EEEEVIL!!!!

Perhaps I have drunk too deeply of the Kool-Aid, but I find myself ever-more bemused by the rabid hatred that some folks have for Twitter. The micro-blogging social media tool is either (a) stupid, (b) idiotic, (c) a waste of time and bandwidth, (d) an active force for evil in this world, or (e) all of the above.

There’s a new article at Ars Technica about the use of Twitter in online games, specifically auto-Tweeting from the games. The case study is about Uncharted 2.

Uncharted 2 was created with a feature Naughty Dog seemed rather excited about: the game would tweet your progress in the game automatically. That meant that your friends would know what you were playing, and how far along you were. It seemed like a good idea, until review copies were sent to the gaming press.

Soon, if you followed the industry, the entirety of some Twitter feeds consisted of messages about their progress in the game. This created something of a backlash, as other gaming writers—which may have included this one—took to tweeting about their progress in random boardgames. A consensus seemed to be reached that allowing a game to take over your Twitter account was a bad thing. Naughty Dog noticed the negative publicity, and very quickly pulled the plug on the feature.

The rest of the article is all about how gaming companies are trying to figure out the right use of Twitter, but that auto-Tweeting is definitely Not It.

The comments are just as bad, if not worse. Not only is some of the anti-Twitter rhetoric even more pointed (“The root of Twiitter is ‘twit'” and “I just don’t get it” (as if that answered everything)), but even the Tweeters make the point that auto-Tweeting is always, categorically, summarily a Bad Thing. (Oh, and a “waste of bandwidth,” as if all the Tweets in a 24-hour period came close to one downloaded movie in bandwidth usage.)

I beg to differ.

Interestingly, Champs Online, as a brand new game with Twittering (and Facebook and something else, too) capability doesn’t get a mention. But it’s story arc parallels that of Uncharted 2. The Twitter feature went live with go-live, and it was immediately clear that it was waaaay overkill. Not only did the updates overwhelm Twitter, but people simply weren’t expecting them to be as frequent as they were (thanks to the standard CO dearth of documentation). A patch later, and things got throttled way back. 

And now?

Well, I make use of it, but I’ve also been careful to create a separate Twitter account to do so. But within those bounds, it works pretty well as a way to track the progress of characters in the game. If nothing else, it makes for some nice fodder when posting here is light on the ground. I’ll be able to look back at some point and say, “Hey, I remember that character” or “Who was I was running who defeated Foxbat?”

It’s not perfect (as if anything in CO) is, but it has potential (just as so much in CO does). I’d like to see some serious control in the Tweeting interface beyond just simple checks on/off. E.g., rather than every 5 levels announcing it, allow someone to make it a number higher than 5. Allow the level of Perks or whatever to be eased back as well.

Offering some guidance, too, would be helpful for users. As would letting the social media settings be set globally for all characters or just for individual ones. And, honestly, there should be some sort of identifying text or hashtag in the Tweets that are made, so that it’s clear what they’re for/from. Even better, as suggested, if a Tweet is going to go out, allow for a prmopt to come up about it to confirm (if not even edit) it.

But the big thing to remember is that this is all voluntary. Everything about Twitter and the reading of same is. Not interested in hearing someone Tweeting about their gameplay? You don’t have to follow them. Wow. What a concept. You never actually see stuff on Twitter unless you explicitly follow someone. And you can easily stop at any time.

Let me repeat that. If someone is Tweeting about their game, and you don’t like it, unfollow them. Better yet, if you’re really interested in what they were saying earlier, but you think the game Tweets are drowning that out, let them know that. 

Yes, I know it’s much more self-amusing to make snide comments about how stupid Twitter is and Twitterers are, or how sophomoric it is to auto-Tweet your game achievements, and to make broad generalizations about What Should or Should Not Ever Be on the Web, like an Internet Mister Blackwell. On the other hand, it’s very difficult to take responsibility for your own reactions to things, to not turn them into universal verities, and to tune your Internet access to just see what you want, rather than demand that everyone follow your particular bliss. 

But, y’know, it might be worth giving it a try.

CoX: Communications Breakdown

So there’s a fair amount of posting going on over at the CoX forums by the Devs — not just the Twittering they’ve been doing — but the Dev Digest (and Community Digest) are broken, so if you want to find what they’ve been saying, you have to search for them individually by name.

Feh. If they don’t see why that’s a real problem and devote some resources to fixing the dev tracker in the new forums, then I certainly can’t explain it to them.

The Tale of Twixt

Whoa. MMORPG + Sociology = Teh Weird.

Loyola media professor David Myers tells the tale (as an academic paper) of what happens when you flout social rules, even if you are perfectly legal (and even supported by the codified moral laws) in doing so. The answer: you become very, very unpopular.

What makes this interesting is that Myers is writing about an experiment he ran himself in CoX, using a veteran toon named “Twixt,” both in its original incarnation on Champions (where it was a long-time character), and rebuilt on Infinity and Freedom. In each case, he managed to get driven out of groups; DOSsed from his chat channel; subjected to disparagement of his intellect, experience, and morals; hunted down by collective teams of heroes and villains; and personally threatened.

All for being a super-hero. As opposed to being a social hero.

Twixt’s activities were run in Recluse’s Victory. His basic sin was doing whatever he could to support the heroic side of the endeavor, regardless of whether it made people happy. His specific and most egregious “breaching” offenses, according to Myers:

  1. Teleport Other of villains into security drones (“droning”) or NPC heroes.
  2. Attacking of villains who were “collaborating” with heroes to farm NPCs in the zone with Heavies.
  3. Declining to team with others (which turned into refusing to do so when too many teams turned into traps by players colluding with each other).

None of these behaviors was illegal. In fact, the Devs never acted on the many petitions lodged against Twixt, In their own way, these actions, esp. the first two, were perfectly keeping with the milieu of heroes vs. villains, much more than many of the folks condemning Twixt’s actions were. Worse, Twixt was very successful at what he was doing, Myers notes

Myers’ conclusions are that social rules are not necessarily constructed based on natural rules (Myers couches this all in various sociological terms such as social constructionist theory, ethnomethodology, positivism, etc., but that’s what it boils down to). 

In real-world environments, “natural” laws governing social relationships, if they exist at all, are part of the same social system in which they operate and, for that reason, are difficult to isolate, measure, and confirm. In Twixt’s case, however, two unique sets of rules – one governing the game system, one governing the game society — offered an opportunity to observe how social rules adapt to system rules (or, more speculatively, how social laws might reproduce natural laws.) And, the clearest answer, based on Twixt’s experience, is that they don’t. Rather, if game rules pose some threat to social order, these rules are simply ignored. And further, if some player — like Twixt — decides to explore those rules fully, then that player is shunned, silenced, and, if at all possible, expelled.

[…] the strong, negative, and increasingly emotional reactions to Twixt’s behavior were almost always focused on preserving beneficent social communities and friendships in blatant disregard of game rules. The most important negative consequence of Twixt’s behavior in the eyes of other players, then, was not his failure to achieve game goals – Twixt’s opponents “failed” this test more often than he did — but his failure to garner and sustain social connections: the most repellant consequence of Twixt’s behavior was that it made him unlikable.

While there are some quibbles I have over Myers’ experience in the game vs. my own, his overall observations seem sound. If the majority of the people playing are there with a goal of socializing, then folks who break the social laws are going to be unwelcome, regardless of the house rules.  

Remaining likable – socially connected — within the CoH/V community meant playing the game according to values other than those made explicit by the game design and the game designers.  Players could only learn these values – much like those affecting social activities in the real world — by becoming (or already being) a member of the game’s entrenched social order.

Looked at another way, the game produces goals, but those are necessarily what is intended with the game design. While the designers intended to promote heroism vs. villainy, and structured RV around that conflict, what has happened is that the actual goals being sought are socializing and character advancement, which can be more easily done (to some or many) through ignoring the RV core conflict and simply farming NPCs — and that usually means ignoring the PvP in the zone. This all gets back to the discussions around farming with the AE mishes — it’s utterly against the milieu rules, and it’s aesthetically repugnant to many, but it’s also a key way that a lot of people (clearly) want to play.

Myers suggests, further, that these sorts of social restrictions create boundaries in gameplay, discouraging people from trying a variety of tactics to pursue the game goals. In the notes, he says:

Play in CoH/V, since its inception in 2004, has displayed at least three distinct stages. The first, most exploratory stage occurred immediately after the game’s release, when all players, due to their inherent ignorance of game rules and methods of play, explored the game environment through a trial and error process very similar in appearance and function to that of Twixt’s breaching play. Once a critical mass of successful game play and players (and information) had been achieved – regardless of whether that success was the result of analysis, effort, or luck – other, not-so-successful play and players began to ally with and mimic the more successful. 

Subsequently, once social groups had been established through such alliances, the game entered its third and current stage, dominated by entrenched groups of experienced players. During this latter stage — in which Twixt began his breaching play — there was no longer any pressing need to find or share game information with others. As a result, game information became devalued in favor of social information and orders. Perhaps it is only during this latter stage of mature online game play that Twixt’s breaching play is most threatening and most likely to evoke such strong negative reactions as those observed in CoH/V.

I think that’s key. CoX has, for many of its players, become not so much “be a super-hero/villain and save/rule the world.” It’s become “PL to 50 ASAP, come up with cool costumes, and hang with your buds.” Myers was the equivalent of the guy at the job who tries to do the work, rather than just earn a paycheck while leaning on the water cooler; that he not only made the folks facing him look bad by taking the actual genre seriously, but by poking at them by defeating them, made the likelihood of social ostracism and threats even greater. (Another analogy, in the NOLA comments below, is that of the guy on the freeway going exactly the speed limit, and the amount of fury that “asshole in the green car up there” can cause to others.

The NOLA article below (which was cross-posted onto CoX forums) has some interesting (as well as disturbing) comments, some of which make it seem that the other articles (less so Myers actual paper) are overstating things.  Many of these don’t get the point — which is not that if you flout social rules then society will get ticked off at you, but that social rules are not necessarily aligned with “natural” (or, in this case, game) rules, and in fact resist those who adhere to the latter rather than the former. The point of Twixt was not, per se, to be a “jerk” or to “grief,” but to do what the game allowed, and what it (and LR in particular) was designed for: vanquishing of the opposing side (XP or not). This irritated the folks who were using the zone instead to farm and socialize and who only considered some forms of combat (i.e., those that didn’t include TP Foe) legit and honorable.

I confess that, caught flatfooted in the face of a really bad ambush in a city zone, I’ve been known to run for the nearest drone. TPing the PvE foe there isn’t any different, and it’s not effectively different of it’s a “P” vs an “E” being TPed).

(If this were, in fact, such a big deal, I shouldn’t think it would be that dire a mechanics change to prevent TP Foe from being targeted within 100m of a drone, or to have someone TP Foed be subject to NPC attacks for 5 seconds after arriving, or something like that. Clearly the Devs don’t think i’s that high a priority.

Still, it’s a very sad indictment of CoX, as an established community, and it makes me glad that I “do my thing” solo or duoed with Margie, rather than as part of some farming collective SG.

Articles on KotakuMassively, NOLA.

Ding!

Elseblog, I mentioned this year’s balloting for the Eagle Awards. Not surprising that there were some good gaming webcomics in there.

Though it didn’t mention Ding! by Scott (PvP) Kurtz, which is even more game-centric (WoW in this case). Though, naturally, many of the themes cross-over to other games (at least to CoX and LotR), such as:

Good stuff.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention I was reminded about Ding! by BD.

CoX: Advertising

Ads are coming to the CoX universe.

NCSoft’s deal with Double Fusion would replace the fake billboards that dot the scenery of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles with genuine, revenue-generating advertisements. The ads should go live some time this summer, but Clayton stresses that it’s up to the player whether or not the ads are visible.
 

“I want to make it very clear that we are not ‘forcing’ in-game ads upon our players. Thus, the word ‘optional’ is of key importance. None of our players have to change their game experience in any way if that’s what they prefer. All that you need to do is opt-out via the Options menu in the game,” he wrote in a post on the City of Heroes web site.

 

Seems fine to me. And CoX (vs WOW or LoTRO or other fantasy/sf games) is perfect for such a thing. Thoiugh I’m not sure who’s going to want to advertise over in the Rogue Isles.

So why would anyone want to show the ads (stay opted in)? Because NCSoft will only get revenue when they are opted in, and the proceeds to go CoX development. Again, nothing wrong with that.

I have no problem with this. 

The game’s afoot

The good news? Nobody’s spending time clucking their tongues and worrying about how nerdy, obsessed, and emotionally immature Dungeons & Dragons players are. That’s because tabletop D&D is passé.

Instead, it seems, now everyone’s spending time clucking their tongues and worrying about how nerdy, obsessed, and emotionally immature MMO players are. As in the view of the newly released film, Second Skin.

But my take was that the film–which focuses mainly on three distinct stories, a gamer who is so deeply addicted to World of Warcraft that he loses almost everything in his life; a household of gamers who spend almost every waking, non-working hour playing; and a couple in the early stages of a relationship that bloomed in EverQuest II–depicts these people as largely dysfunctional, out of touch with the world around them and not very capable of dealing with that world.

Of course, that’s an extreme view of the film, and I know for a fact that many in the audience saw it very differently. I overheard many saying afterwards that they thought the film was uplifting and a positive, realistic look at these games and the people who play them.

I just don’t agree. For me, part of the problem may have something to do with the fact that I’ve been writing about virtual worlds and online games regularly for more than four years. As a result, much of the underlying context of the film was not even a little bit new to me. And so I think I may have been looking more at the way the film’s subjects were portrayed than many of the audience members who, I surmised, were largely new to this topic.

I could have that totally backwards, of course. Perhaps they were mostly hard-core WoW players who saw themselves in the film’s subjects. I’m not sure.

But I guess I was a little upset because I think many people are looking at this film as a definitive view on what online games and virtual worlds are, and I simply felt it was far too narrow a view.

 

At least nobody’s ranting about how World of Warcraft is actually a Satanic plot. Well, not yet.

 

No Marvel, but Champs?

I’d heard rumors (and saw that it was being discussed at the CoX boards), but it took Les to point me to something that confirmed that the long-planned Marvel MMORPG has been canceled — though it’s not clear whether it was because of development troubles or if Microsoft decided that MMORPGs were not a likely profitable venture. He also points to word that Cryptic is instead (swapping out the costumes?) doing a Champions MMORPG

I never played Champions, but I do think there’s room for another superheroes MMO (heck, if there can be umpteen zillion fantasy MMOs …). I hope it’s successful, and not just an attempt to recoup losses (and code) from the Marvel cancellation.