Category: MMO

Ingress: The Worst and Best

On the Ingress Colorado Enlightenment site, we had a thread about Worst and Best things about Ingress.  Here’s what I came up with, some of which are ideas that others had, some of which are restatements of things I’ve recorded in recent blog posts here.

TOP TEN WORST THINGS ABOUT INGRESS:

1. A regional / metro death spiral into one side dominating the battleground. Even were things can be taken back, it’s brief, as the other side has been able to farm their much-more-drop-friendly portals to gain an imbalanced inventory.  
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Increase the hack reward from enemy portals, esp. of Bursters.
b. Do something to dynamically increase the powers of, drop rates to, success rates of the lower level team (e.g., based on the distance to the nearest friendly portal). (The opposite could be done for the majority team, but I don’t want people to feel penalized by success.)
c. Add another faction (or two). This divides up the population enough that one side is less likely to dominate.
d. Add an NPC faction, that can focus somewhat more on the majority in an area.
e. Make zapping portals easier, building them harder (either through drop rates, or the effects of bursters vs energy of resonators).
f. Increase decay rates based on proximity of others portals. Make creating a farm (including a regional farm) harder.
g. Having a portal key gives you an additional advantages when hacking an enemy portal (more drops, greater damage, greater AP).
h. Inventory item decay.  Above a certainly medium number, inventory items (at each level?) decay at X%/day. That controls inventories, reduces the pinata drop advantage of friendly farms, encourages people to use it or lose it, but doesn’t penalize folks who are stocking up for a big event. Maybe make items that you can’t use yet immune to that decay.

Pity the Newbs

2. There is an evident barrier (esp. in #1 situation) to low level players, especially ones without higher level mentors or the ability/finances to drive all over God’s creation.
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Increase the power of low-level Bursters. L1 Bursters presently are a joke. L2s are not much better. (Optionally, have that effect fade when you get X levels above the level of a Burster, encouraging L7s to drop their L1 Bursters for lower level folks to use.)
b. Increase the hack AP reward against enemy portals. This benefits low-level players most (as a percent-of-level).
c. Limit Burster Level use to Portal Level +2. E.g., high level players can’t drop L6s on that L1 portal. They have to slug it out some.
d. Alternately to (c), limit who can (within a 5 minute period) attack a portal to someone at Portal Level +3 or less.  So an L8can’t just knock down L4 portals, only higher level ones. (As the portal is attacked, though, its level drops, thus the time period within which an L8 can take down an L6 portal even when it dips to L4 and below).

3. Doing something — sometimes taking several minutes to do so (driving somewhere, maneuvering around with cranky GPS signal. etc.) — and having it give you nothing.
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Every hack should net you something.  Maybe not much, but no effort should go without some reward.

4. Slow responses from Niantic regarding portals — new portals, portals without pictures, duplicate portals, portal bad locations, portal bad names, etc.  The last three are definitely dings on the perceived quality of the game.
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Error correction / quality should take priority over bringing new portals online, esp. in areas where there are already substantial numbers of portals.
b. Add more tools to facilitate error corrections (e.g., to submit a new picture for a portal).

5. Lack of keys, which hampers building links and CFs, which not only slows progress but denies one of the most awesome things you can do in the game.
SUGGESTIONS:
a. More key drops.  Or maybe more key drops on enemy portals.
b. Alternately (but, I think, less desirably  have keys be permanent. Once you have the key to a portal, you can link to/from it indefinitely. This maybe makes things too easy.

Only you …

6. Mobile platforms are cool, but not the easiest to interact with. The Intel page is great, but highly limited.
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Allow recharges (and view of portal key possession) from the Intel map. (Really, Google can tell where my location is on my PC, so why not let me use that?)
b. Allow (or make straightforward) portal submissions from the PC (maybe through G+).
c. Provide inventory control from the Intel map.  Do I have that portal key? How many resonators do I have?  It’s ridiculous to spend a minute to open the mobile client in order to determine that.
c. Rationalize the interface between the PC and Mobile versions. Where to enter in codes, for example, is a completely different affair.
d. Allow Faction chat to be set as the default.
e. Inventory interface on the mobile device needs to be greatly improved. Takes too long to see what you’ve got, let alone use it.
d. Anything that can be done to reduce power usage on the phone should be. That might include allowing the screen to blank/dim but still be picking up XM. My Moto Razr Maxx works pretty decently, but even I get drained; I have no idea how others with smaller batteries mange.
e. The GPS control in the client seems much less stable than, say, what Google Maps is able to figure out from the GPS. Please fix this, as it makes hacking or attacking some portals change from a 5 minute task to a 15 minutes task.
f. Portal key management on the mobile needs to be completely redone. Sorting alphabetically is rarely useful. I want to be able to sort by proximity. I want to be able to filter out which keys are to portals that are friendly (that I might recharge). I want to be able to star/flag portals that are of particular interest to me.
f. Both mobile and PC should notify you if your resonators are under attack.
g. There’s a lot of wasted time hacking portals before they are ready to be rehacked. The mobile client should monitor this and not let me re-hack until it’s time to do so (maybe even with a timer over the hack button).
h. The game seems too easily hung up, requiring a Force Sync or Force Stop of the app. This gets really frustrating in the middle of trying to take a portal. Um … fix this.
i. If things get hung up, it seems the device being used (e.g., a Burster stuck in mid-burst) gets lost, even if there’s no effect. That should change.
j. The press-to-fire option on the mobile device only picks the highest level Burster you have. But there are empty boxes on the interface — why not second-highest and third-highest (to encourage finesse)?
k. When I hack a portal, I want the results to show up in the COMM window, too, just like with code entries.

7. The decode codes are, unfortunately, very easily accessible to some people (who monitor the decode sites and can easily get to their client) and not to others. This engenders resentment, annoyance, or just a plain feeling of unhappiness.
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Codes need a longer lifespan. Much longer.
b. Code access should be part of the game, not a matter of personally decoding or monitoring independent decode sites.  Maybe some hacks give you codes, or codes are found on documents at some portals, or ADA suggests a code to you …

Endless war, pawn against pawn

8. Even if regional balance is in place, it’s an endless war, with no real difference between the sides, which eventually can get boring.
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Create faction-specific abilities (changes in hack results, for example — builders vs destroyers; variation in how deploying, or linking, or decay works, etc.). This requires some careful balancing.
b. Rather than every player being the same at each level, allow some sort of personal specialization or simple skill tree — improved bursting, improved resonator placement or energy levels, improved hacking. Not wildly different, but enough to allow some variations based on the player’s preferred style.
c. Have the rules vary over time. This could be arbitrary, but could also be cyclical (and thus strategically usable), e.g., it’s easier to burst things during Full Moon, while resonators placed at the New Moon have more energy.
d. Have portals be defined by type — POs, libraries, police stations, public art, “Other” — with differing natures (drops, vulnerabilities, XM strengths, link ranges) depending on the type.
e. There should be some positive effect — beyond the initial AP reward and wildly abstract global numbers — to having and maintaining a CF. That’s the metagame goal, but nothing in the actual game supports that. It can’t be imbalancing (see #1), but maybe a convenience — increased XM recovery while in a friendly CF, for example.

Time vs the Casual Player

9. People with no lives too easily dominate those of us who have to work (study, caretake) for a living. Some of that is inevitable, but … well, I don’t want to frustrate people who have a chance to play, but casual players need a chance to be competitive, too, and an obsessive few can have too great a control over too much of an area.
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Create hourly activity caps — X hacks, Y bursts, etc., then a 15-30 minute cool-down.
b. Alternately, reduce effectiveness over time (after X hacks per hour, the drop rate goes down; after Y bursts per hour the range or strength starts to drop).

10. There’s a huge meta-story out there, but it doesn’t really impact on the game.  (And some people aren’t interested in tracking it).
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Events in the story feed back into the game (through client updates).  E.g., something happens that changes Resistance abilities, and the scanner notes that when applicable. “Your bursters seem weaker than before. Perhaps Professor Smith’s theory is correct.”  It’s not deep immersion, but it’s more than happens now.
b. Game event info shows up in the COMM. “ADA: Be on the look-out for Professor Jones.” (Maybe with a minor reward if you find a portal that has Professor Jones hanging around it for some reason.)

=======================

TOP FIVE THINGS I REALLY ENJOY:

Awesomesauce

1. Creating a link is great.  Creating a CF is awesome.

2. Though not a social kind of guy, the discussions and occasional activities are keen.

3. Exploring my city — the streets, the art, even the post offices and libraries.

4. Playing with my wife.

5. Running into another player. Even an opponent. It adds a sense of reality to the game.

========================

And, needless to say, the Top Five Enjoyments are, for the moment, greater than the Top Ten Worsts.

Ingress: So, what’s worse than an endless war?

An endless guerrilla war …

So here’s the biggest complaint I have about Ingress at the moment — and it’s a complaint I see all over the boards, too.

One side’s won.

It’s a different side depending on what city you’re in. But in way too many cities, the give and take of war and raids and sniping and attacks and retreats and fighting another day has turned into a monochrome. Take, for example, Denver (click to embiggen).

Oh, I’m bluuuuuueee …

That’s a lot of blue.

The current gameplay in Ingress seems to have a tipping point that turns into a death spiral for game competition.

Let’s look at the Pros and Cons of being a city majority, and how that prevents the other side from turning the tide.

THE MAJORITY SIDE

Pros:

  • Because friendly portals give big drops of kit, everywhere is a farm for you. Resonators, Bursters, Shields for all!
  • Lots of portals means lots of links means lots of CF means lots of AP means lots of leveling.

Cons:

  • Large networks of portals decay over time. It’s difficult to keep them up. (But, then, why do you need to? It just provides additional stuff to do later.)
  • Large networks of portals are subject to attack anywhere. It’s difficult to defend every portal. (But, then, why do you need to? See below.)

THE MINORITY SIDE

Pros:

  • “A target-rich environment.”
  • Hacking nets you 100 AP per portal …  great for L1 (climbing from 0-10,000), not so useful for L6 (climbing from 300,000 to 600,000).

Cons:

  • Enemy portals bite back when hacked, draining XM.
  • Enemy portals give nothing or very little in the way of kit drops.
  • Taking a portal and building anything is largely an effort in putting a big target on the map for folks wanting the AP of taking something down.
The problem with liberating a portal.

The last “Con” is probably the biggest thing. The Majority Side is always looking for things to attack, because taking portals is a big part of what nets you AP.  And, of course, they have very few opportunities to do so, because they have the majority of portals already. And, of course, all those friendly portals have given them massive arsenals to attack with and equipment to build with.

Result: build a Minority-color portal, and everyone on the Majority-color side is on it like scavengers on the Serengeti. If you build it, they will come.

Which means, of course, that the Minority side can never build up items, or links, or Control Fields. Which means they can’t really get the big AP rewards. Which means they can’t advance enough to take on the Majority side, take back enough of the portals to counter the advantages of the Majority side.

(Note, “The Majority Side” can be either Resistance or Enlightenment. In Denver, the Resistance — blue — has the unshakable upper hand. The Enlightenment — green — has the upper hand in other cities.)

Ingress is balanced to the extent that it can be highly imbalanced in either direction

Why is this bad?

For the Majority side it’s bad because there’s little challenge. Going all piranha on the few Minority portals that pop up is all well and good, and the completionists will enjoy building a Tholian Web of links and CFs across the metro area. But there’s not a lot of interesting stuff there, except for OCD types and bullies.

All Your Mind Units Are Belong To Us

Worse, as the Majority side continues to level, the number of portals that are accessible to low-level types (on either side, but let’s focus on the Minority side) become miniscule. Which means you’ve erected a barrier to new players entering the game (especially, but not solely, on the Minority side).

Now if you complain about this on the boards, you get some people coming up with the following suggestions, none of which resolve the problem for most players:

  1. “If you are willing to get in a care and drive, you can find low-level portals out in the hinterlands to take over and level with.”  Which assumes that any player worth their salt is going to get in a car and drive around to play the game.  Which means disposable income, a lack of regard for the environment, and lots of free time. Oh, and dedication, beyond what a casual player is going to have.
  2. “If you team up with higher level players, you can all cooperate to take things down.” This assumes that players of the game are all gregarious types who are going to join boards, participate in planning raids, and do all that kind of social stuff. (Or, if you’re not, it assumes you should quit.) It also assumes that there are higher level players around. (Which is where you get into the “Invite some higher level players to drive to your city and help clear things out” suggestion. Which can do a short, initial number on the Majority side, but is unlikely to change things around based on stockpiles, and is also not something you can or should count on as a fundamental game process).
  3. “Wait until the Majority side gets bored and leaves the game. Then you can take back over.” Assuming that will actually ever happen, it’s a rather ugly meta way to succeed. And while you’re doing whole waiting thing, the Minority side is probably going to get bored and leave the game, too.
Or maybe we could just have a table of eager young professionals, and one seasoned, mature executive, figure out an answer.

Which brings this all around to another major point: while Ingress as a whole is a positive experience for some of the Majority (OCD and Bullies) and some players as a whole (people who are willing to team, willing to dedicate lots of time to the game, willing to drive around a lot) — that’s not a recipe for a broadly successful game. It’s possible that’s enough to do whatever data farming Niantic and/or Google are looking to do, but it’s a recipe for Ingress never much leaving beta (or, upon leaving beta, not surviving over six months). And somehow, I think the Powers That Be want something a bit more robust.

So, what should Niantic do?

Well, there are any number of suggestions that have been made, many of them contradictory.  A few of the biggies that appeal to me:

  1. Change the Build/Destroy balance. Right now it’s a lot easier to build than to destroy. If it were easier to tear down portals, that would impact the Majority most.
  2. Give some advantage (or less disadvantage) to the Minority. It’s been suggested, for example, that Enemy portals should drop more Bursters (offensive weapons) when hacked, or at least should drop at the same rate as Friendly portals.
  3. Give some disadvantage (or less advantage) to the Majority:  An NPC third faction, which tends to attack the Majority more often, is an obvious suggestion. Increasing drops to the Minority (or decreasing them for the Majority) is another. Having friendly portals actually suck XM away from you is another.

Of course, all of this has to be done with some care. You don’t want people to not want to succeed for fear of drawing major disadvantages.  And ideally you want a system that oscillates between different factions being in the lead, rather than deteriorating to a Steady State / Trench Warfare.  And you don’t want people to feel railroaded or too manipulated by the game masters.

Wait, Google’s the one we’re trying to correct here.

But you (and by “you” I mean “Niantic”) need to do something.  I’m seeing more and more folks on the boards sounding discouraged or frustrated at being stuck in a permanent Minority, at having anything they capture or build be immediately seized back. I’m currently playing guerrilla warfare — tackling only portals I can take with relative ease that also happen to have a large number of links and CFs hanging off of them, maximizing AP gained as well as visual impact on the Resistance.  But that’s not something that everyone can do, and, at best, it’s a way of advancing me but not the overall Enlightenment cause. And, frankly, I don’t know how sustainable it is.

(Oh, yeah — I am doing the “team up with a newbie to help them advance” thing … but only because the newbie sleeps with me …)

“Oh, and PL MEH PLZ.”

(My wife, that is.)

(Ironically, viz the cartoon, I use my wife’s health and dental benefits. But I digress.)

I want Ingress to be a success.  Truly. I would say, at the moment, this situation is the biggest challenge to it being so. If Niantic and Google can’t come up with a game with a robust variation in situation (one side winning, then the other, and back and forth) and keep it from becoming an endless stalemate … then Ingress will fail. At least as a game.

 

Still looking for my next game …

So I haven’t been playing much game at all, of any sort.  Is that because I’ve been very busy, or because I haven’t found anything I was so enthused about that I haven’t been motivated to move beyond the busy?  Why, yes.

Two, quite different, games I am keeping an eye on:

Marvel Heroes is basically Diablo with, well, Marvel Heroes. Looks like mindless fun with a F2P model. I am resisting dropping $20 in advance for extra costume options (ho-hum). The kicker may be if they make the game so grindy that you’re incented to buy XP boosters to make it bearable. On the other hand, a Brian Bendis overarching storyline, so maybe worthwhile.

Elder Scrolls Online is looking very nice — both in terms of very nice looks and in terms of MMO gameplay design that sounds like it could be up my (our) alley.

Meanwhile, Margie and I played a little WoW yesterday. Not feeling the burn, but it’s still nice to do. And Margie finally got her Ingress invite, so some goodness there, too.

Ingress – Play thoughts after a month

“In the heart. In the head. I won’t stay dead. Next time I’ll do the same to you. I’ll kill you. And it goes on, the good old game of war, pawn against pawn! Stopping the bad guys! While somewhere, something sits back and laughs, and starts it all over again!” — James Kirk, “Day of the Dove”

I’ve been playing Ingress for a month now.* It’s been fun, even exciting. It’s gotten me walking even more on my lunch hours, helped me learn more about downtown Denver (and some of the ‘burbs), and introduced me to a new set of online comrades.

Being locked in eternal warfare isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

But, even as the game slowly makes its way through Google’s Beta process, I can see a problem, summed up, perhaps inadvertently, by one of the lead players in the Denver “Enlightened” community:  “This game wasn’t designed to have a winner, just a constant ongoing battle.”

Yeah, that never ends well.

Because it never ends.

“[W]e’re a doomed ship, travelling forever between galaxies, filled with eternal bloodlust, eternal warfare.” — James Kirk, “Day of the Dove”

Granted, most MMOs, for example, never end. The world sometimes changes, but neither Horde nor the Alliance will ever triumph in World of Warcraft. And even if they did, there are plenty of other challenges and challengers out there.

But in WoW, the gameplay changes. Characters advance. New alts get brought on. Different races get played. Different mission tracks get followed.

But aside from a very basic leveling mechanism (that treats everyone the same), and the slow entry of additional portals into the game … there’s no real change going on in Ingress.** And that’s a problem.

Interminable wars with neither side able to win are, ultimately, meaningless and/or boring (cf. trench warfare of WWI, repeated taking/losing/retaking of hilltops in Korea, and ST:TOS eps “A Taste of Armageddon” and “Day of the Dove”). I can see that as, in not too long a time frame, a problem Ingress will face as it currently stands. How will Google/Niantic address that over time?

  • They could shake things up by having the rules/conditions change at various times, making the strategies and tactics necessary for success evolve to keep up. That might help a bit.
  • A bigger change might be new factions; a rumor has been circulating of an iOS version of the app, but that Apple players would be a separate set of factions (yellow and red?) competing against each other and the existing two factions.  That would complicate the dynamic, some.
  • A third NPC faction would be a fine addition to the game at some point. By being a computer-based faction, Google could change behaviors to keep folks on their toes.

“Be a pawn, be a toy, be a good soldier that never questions orders.” — James Kirk, “Day of the Dove”

 None of the above changes, though, alter the basic equation: I take your portal for myself, build it up, then you come back with friends and take my portal, and build it up for yourself. Rinse, repeat.
Creating some variety in the conflict would be helpful.

Another direction to explore might be some other method that (a) changes the dynamic between Enlightened and Resistance and (b) provides some milestone “success”/achievement/reward beyond incremental AP increases. The excitement — the value add — in current game mechanics really stops when portals are linked and a Control Field (CF) between three portals is created. At that point, besides adding more links from the same portal (often with more difficulty but no greater payoff) there’s no advantage to maintaining what’s there aside from “Yee-haw, look at all that Green/Blue on the map.” Nothing changes in the world if the Resistance takes back my portal, except, once it happens the hundredth time I just shrug and, yes, “Well, there’s something I can hack for some AP.” (Yes, the game as it stands actually incents the other side taking your portal, so that you can get credit when you take it back in turn.)***

So, yes, there could be some benefit to rewarding maintenance and preservation of things (maybe an incremental boost to AP each day for each portal, based on level, a person still has in place), as well as some actual in-game effects from having links and CFs built and maintained (perhaps increasing a portal’s strength when it’s linked to another portal, or when a CF is in place, or extra XM creation under a CF).

Or maybe you make it (more dangerously to player satisfaction) a negative — you forfeit (reduced over time) some of the AP you got from putting up a CF or link (or even a portal) when it gets taken down. Or maybe that zorches some of the XP you’re carrying (which might be trivial if you’re on the road, or might be a real bummer if you’re actually in the field trying to hack).

Ever have the feeling Google is watching you?

And whatever advantages (or costs), the game makers need to be sure that they also maintain a balance for players of all levels.  Right now we have everything running around from L1s to L8s. It seems far too easy for newcomers to the game to feel like there’s little they can do — no portals they can possibly budge, but can only hack at slowly over time for the AP that activity gives. It feels — at least at the moment — like it’s far more expensive to tear down than to build up, given normal drop rates from hacks.

On one level, that’s the way it should be (it’s futile to build if it gets immediately destroyed), but it also creates a barrier to beginners, or even continue-ers (it’s futile to try to destroy if you’re too weak to do so).

“Out! We need no urging to hate humans. But for the present, only a fool fights in a burning house. Out!” — Kang, “Day of the Dove”

 And does the game eventually going public change that any?  I don’t think so. The last consideration mentioned probably isn’t one at all, as it’s true in its own way for all online games: it’s darn tough for someone who isn’t unemployed, or has a lot of free time on their hands, to compete.  Especially if you’re not in an urban center, the current distribution of portals means playing the game means getting in your car and driving around (probably not the most climate-friendly sort of gameplay), hitting what you can in the local environs.  Though Google/Niantic accept applications for more portals, that appears to be a fairly slow process, and remains most focused in urban area.
Like anyone else, Google wants happy customers.

Now, to be sure, Google’s point with Ingress is not to make the perfect game, by any means. They have some very pragmatic reasons for the game. But if they want that to be more than a short-duration series of data points, they will need to do something to keep people engaged and interested.

*That was actually a week and change ago. I’ve been pondering this post for a while.

**Yes, it’s beta. I know. I can only judge things by where they are right now. In beta.

***In some ways, it feels more like one of those Cold War / “Great Game” types of films, where the Station Chiefs for the opposing sides contest against each other, but with the understanding it that it should be kept gentlemanly and not put either side too far out of shape.

UPDATE: (Told you I’ve been pondering this for a while.)  A few other thoughts:

  1. The game needs to be both solo- and team-friendly. Right now there seems to be much more effectiveness in teams of players, in terms of resources (blasters, resonators, keys) available. That’s fine — for some. For others (cough), teaming is less likely because of other restrictions. That can make the growth curve a lot more difficult.
  2. Team play needs some refinements.

    That having been said, right now team play is rather crude.  The person who does X gets all the credit for X.  If Google wants to encourage team play, there should be some sort of bonus for it.  E.g., anyone within the 30m sensor range of a portal gets some fraction of AP credit for events that occur regarding that portal (destroying things, deploying things, linking things), or perhaps only if they’ve done something against/with that portal (other than hacking) so far. That would encourage people to team up, and would also make it easier for higher level folks to mentor newbies.

  3. Google continues to change some of the game parameters to meet what it thinks is competitive play. In the time I’ve been playing, we’ve seen a drastic reduction in key drops, a couple of trial changes in how XMP bursters do damage, and (since I stated this post) a reduction in burster range. In general, it’s made the game more difficult, in terms of taking over stuff — which might fit into some play balance problems elsewhere, but which I, in general, have found to make things less fun.
  4. One could argue that the “variety” in the game comes from the metastory — all the clues and websites and this and that about what the portals really are and Niantic and Enlightened and Resistance and puzzles and all that.  And … one would be wrong. Because, as far as the game is concerned, that’s all flavor text. Some folks are into the story and the puzzles. Some aren’t. I think Google wants both groups.
  5. Victory! Which, frankly, gets kind of boring, if it lasts too long.

    The biggest challenge seems to be when one side or the other gets a lock on territory — the majority or near totality of portals in an area.  This is often accompanied by high-level portals being established as anchors, and “portal farms” that are milked for drops. The result is that attempts by the other side to take anything back tend to be short-lived — the majority group has the resources and a small number of targets to apply to them.  The result is one side feeling completely outgunned, and the other side — well, frankly, getting bored (and thus doing counter-intuitive things like letting their portals decay so they can take them back again). This imbalance can change slowly (if people decide to switch sides — though they can do so only once), and can also be changed by broad changes in strategy by the “out” side, but it still seems to be something that could easily unbalance the game. (This is another area where a third faction — esp. an NPC faction that tended to go after the majority, would be of some advantage to the game.)

I am still having fun. But I can also see this, right now, very easily as a game that one day you just suddenly say, “Y’know the heck with it,” and either greatly cut back on playing or quit. And I don’t think that’s the model that Google is looking for.

“I’m going to Disneyland!”

Margie and I went to Downtown Disney in Anaheim last night as a “date night,” scheduling a very nice dinner at Catal for 8 so we could be on the balcony to see the fireworks at 9:30.

Disneyland

Margie’s been very funny about Ingress with me. On the one hand, she kind of mockingly pooh-poohs it as “marking territory” (when she’s polite) and derives great amusement at my being involved in it, she’s also been unexpectedly supportive of my doing it. So whenever we’ve gone out while here in SoCal this vacation, she’s driven so I can hack at passing portals (and has been known to swerve into a parking lot if they’re a bit too far from the roadway).

On Christmas, she indulged me in heading to my folks’ house by way of Glendora Ave., which had several portals between the freeway and downtown. I was just a fraction away from Level 4, and between going and coming back, I managed to level.

So last night we were at Downtown Disney. It should come as no particular surprise that Disneyland itself is full of portals, the majority of them player submitted, I assume. I would guess there are some players who work at the park, others who have annual passes, and the rest are vacationers and visitors passing by and adding another layer to their holiday experience.

Downtown Disney. The green portals in the middle are ones I took over.

Downtown Disney is open to the public, being a shopping / restaurant hub between the parks and the Disneyland hotel. And Margie appeared to have fun encouraging me to hack as I liked, and even standing by while I attacked and took a couple of the portals — the funny hat by the hotel, attacking the blue portal at the Rainforest Cafe, taking the portal at the fountain in front of the House of Blues, and struggling with the very powerful one centered on the trumpeter at the New Orleans restaurant there.

We even walked beyond the Disney Store (past the blue portal at the tram fountain) to the plaza between Disneyland and Disney’s California Adventure.  There was a whole series of green portals there which I was able to hack at for fun and prizes. And enough stray XM in the air to recharge me no matter what.

The best was that there was a portal right outside Catal, so I could sit there and hack at it every five minutes from our dinner table until it burned out. Then I took it over for the Enlightenment and netted many more AP.

I also chatted a bit on the Comms with the locals, including one guy who is moving out to Boulder in the summer. I told him there was a pretty vibrant Enlightened community in the Denver area, which he was happy to hear.

Villa Park, down by the Ralphs Market. The local home turf.

On the way home Margie took me (unrequested) by a post office we hadn’t gone by previously (the portal was mid-building, though, so we couldn’t hit it), and then by the Ralphs near her folks’ house, where I took back two of the portals that had been turned back to blue, and reinforcing the green ones that had been attacked.  (Fortunately, the prowl car with two of Villa Park’s Finest decided we were not suspicious parked in the lot with the engine running.)

So I’m a third of the way through L4 now, which was unexpected, and I had fun, and I think Margie had fun (copious thanks be unto her). And, yeah, it’s just a game, but it’s a nice little add-on to what was already a very nice evening.

I am … Enlightened

Yes. I am

… one of …

… Those People

… who …

… play Ingress.

The game is still in closed beta — invitation only (and, no, I don’t have any invitations to pass on) — but there are a decent number of people playing already.

On one level, Ingress is a simple territory-capture game, with the unique quality of being grounded in the Real World.  Portals are located at a variety of interesting public locations — post offices, museums, unique buildings, public art (and players can submit similar landmarks to become new portals).  Using a Google Maps-based interface on an Android smartphone, you can find where the portals are — in the Real World — and then try to co-opt them for your team, harnessing their strength and linking them to other portals and defending them against the other side …

… well, yes, of course, there’s another side.  Because there’s a higher level game, involving CERN and Higgs-Boson research, and the release of strange energies that lead to (maybe) some folks from Elsewhere (the Shapers) pushing into our world (through portals) to shape the minds of humanity.

So you have the Enlightened (Green) who welcome these efforts as a way of enhancing and impr0ving humanity.  And you have the Resistance (Blue) who are against any tinkering with human development.

And when you start to play, you choose which side to be on. At which point you and yours can start tussling over portals, helping defend them, attacking the portals of the other side, and either opening up human minds to Shaper activities, or protecting them from same.

Or, as Margie so eloquently puts it, “pissing on things to mark your territory.” Poetry in motion, my wife.

And at a level above all that, Ingress has all sorts of conspiracy / mystery / WTF-figuring-out bits to put Fringe and the X-Files to shame.  I’m not doing those bits, because life is too short, but some people hang on every word that comes from Niantic Labs about what’s actually going on.

So … about me.

I’ve been playing about a week, and having fun. I do a bit more vigorous walking at lunch, as there are all sorts of portals in downtown Denver that need boosting, refreshing, attacking, co-opting, linking. Plus the community of other folks in the Enlightenment, with our own G+ group for Colorado, discussing plans, activities, issues.

Some of the folks are a lot more into them game than I am. I’m not the “Let’s go on a group raid tonight, in real life, and turn all the Resistance portals on the Auroria Campus into Enlightened portals” type. On the other hand, there are a few portals along my commute that I’ll take a little extra time to touch bases on, and my Noon-time walks haven’t been the same since I started the game. And what’s really going on with the Blue Bear, or that curly-cue thing on the other side of the Convention Center, or …

It’s fun.

And I can see how it could be a total time sink for folks — just like any other online game. This one has, at least, the advantage of getting folks off their chairs and out into the real world.

A Google Surprise — Worldwide Alternative Reality Game Ingress Revealed | Singularity Hub
Google's "AR" Game Ingress Offers A Glimpse Of The Future
Why Google's Ingress game is a data gold mine – tech – 29 November 2012 – New Scientist
Inside Ingress, Google's new augmented-reality game | Internet & Media – CNET News

Before you delete that City of Heroes installation …

You might check out the Titan Icon project, which opens up the Costume Maker and lets you play CoH Paper Dolls design characters with it.

Of course, some might find it too frustrating to be able to create characters visually, but not play them.  But others might not.

Note that directly working with the CoH files may violate the CoH Terms of Service (ha!) or cause someone at NCSoft to become quite cross with you (HA!).

(h/t to ZzzzSleep)

So, besides mourning CoH, what else game-wise have I done lately?

The extended memorial service for City of Heroes, posted earlier today, aside, what’s new for me and online gaming?

Um … honestly, not a heck of a lot.

First off, it’s been a busy month or two. Margie’s been away on business. I’ve been away on business. Holidays and social butterflying and all that sort of thing. And the next month isn’t looking any better.

Secondly, yeah, I’ve been in mourning. Mercifully, Margie talked me into playing CoH one last time before it went away. But since then … really haven’t felt the yen.

And thirdly … well, I haven’t found … the thing. The game to take its place.  I’ve done some World of Warcraft solo and duoed, and likely will some more. But while it’s a decently pleasant passtime, I’m just not feeling the characters as such (something I became very aware of as I was crafting my endless memorials). There’s more variety (if of a less-rich nature) than of Lord of the Rings Online, but, honestly, I don’t feel invested in the characters in either game. With everyone wearing whatever they pick up, and the power/skill selection being fairly categorized, the players are (absent a strong social environment, which we’re not and not likely to get into) pretty much cookie cutter in nature.

(And that, I’m realizing, was one of the geniuses of CoH — that your fundamental appearance could be so different and unique, and the encouragement to have an origin story and a cool super-name to go with it, and that even your power selections could be tailored and tweaked and recombined and enhanced and respecced and recolored to make you completely individual. The focus was more on the characters than on the setting, though the setting was still pretty full of content.)

I’ve given Champions Online another go, and while some of those CoH advantages might seem to pertain, it feels both too mechanics-driven and too arduously neutral / balanced, to the point where every blast power is kind of like ever other blast power, and so forth.  And the setting starts to come into play again as feeling uneven and alternately goofy and grim. Plus, the whole game feels like a carnival in so many ways.

I haven’t retried DC Universe Online, or Star Trek Online, but I don’t recall much (or see much in current press) to make me feel they will fit any better.

Maybe we need to try D&D Online again / some more, since that has such character differentiation. There was something vaguely disjointed about what experience we had there, but we didn’t really drive things to any great conclusion.

I keep hearing encouraging words about Star Wars: The Old Republic — and highly discouraging words about it, too. But maybe that’s a possibility.

People keep suggesting to me Guild Wars 2, but aside from my fiery passion to not give another red cent to NCSoft, I hear a lot of trouble in that particular paradise, too.

So … what next?  I haven’t the foggiest. And, honestly, given the “firstly” above, I don’t expect to make any great progress until January. At least. At the earliest.

And that’s okay, right? Because it’s not like I don’t have eleventy-dozen other things going on. And while Playing Game with Margie is a lot of fun and doing-stuff-togethery, it’s not the be-all and end-all of our relationship.

I’ll — we’ll — find something that we enjoy together. And (assuming it’s a game), we’ll give it a try. And we’ll have fun. Or not, in which case we’ll move on.

Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on, brah,
La la, how the life goes on.

In Memorium – CoH – Various and Sundry

Continuing my series of City of Heroes characters …

Over the years, Margie did a lot of solo play in City of Heroes, on a variety of servers. She actually got four solo toons to 50 (including one the day before last of the game), and many others into their 30s and 40s.

One advantage of this is that it encouraged us to create SGs on all those servers, which served her purposes (base!), but also let us play new toons there as needed.

Here’s a collection of some of her major solo toons, followed by some other miscellaneous characters I wanted to write about.

Blue Point was a Broadsword scrapper that Margie soloed to 50. She played around with costumes with her quite a bit.

Day Old Shelf was one of Margie’s characters from the Devil’s Food SG on Freedom, a Zombie/Force Field Mastermind.  She actually pushed him to 50, too. Grats!

Old Star, on Pinnacle, was a Fire/Rad Controller. She one of the ones Margie got up to 50. While controllers are not high DPS, normally, this particular combo had striking Tanking abilities, and lots of AoE fire and rad control, both with damage. It was a methodical destruction of everything she encountered, but it worked.

Fantasy Enforcer was a Broadsword/Willpower Scrapper on Infinity. Margie dinged her to 50 the day before CoH went down.

Fallen Twice was another toon that Margie kept coming back to. A Defender, Kinetics/Electric, he was slow to advance, but apparently fun to play (he got up to at least 20).

Margie did a couple of versions of him. The last pic shows Second Fallen, with one of my favorite (conceptually) early toons, (“They Call Me …”) Mr. Thebes.

We never had much luck playing Kheldians, either teamed up or in mixed pairs. Which is a shame, because they were a really neat concept, just compromised in too many ways.  Above is Margie’s Cetus, who got to 22.  No idea about the pirate motif …

The Last Ice Dragon was … well, a Dragon (or, as I recall the backstory, a survivor from a primordial race of reptilians). And an Ice/Ice Blaster. She never dinged 50, but Margie played her a lot to get her to 37. Soloing with a blaster is not at all easy, but Ice, with its speed debuffs, is not a bad way to go with it.

Another Margie character, Blue Isles (Dual Pistols / Energy Manip Blaster 26).

A few miscellaneous characters, just because:  My Thyme (Scrapper 23); Darke Hope (Scrapper 24), Deep Charge (Energy Brute 21). Margie liked her High-DPS Melee Characters.

Jack a Lope made it to 29 (in her highest level version), but Margie wanted to take some Shadow Shard pictures, so here’s this mid-level Martial Arts/Invuln Scrapper … in ANOTHER DIMENSION!

Honorable mention to Margie’s toons Copper Mountain (several iterations), Ultra-Violet, Ultra-Violette, Exquisite Flame, Divine Retribution, Blue Tangerine, Crownless King, Eluwen, Lonely Angel, Lufwage, Midnight Death, Sa’Kage, Secret, Trixie J., Victorian Pride (Scrapper 12), Bad-Tough, Big Orange (Scrapper 20).

* * *

And a few last bits and bobs …

Sister Chinook was one of my original toons, an Ice Controller. I had mixed experiences with that set — lots of control, but also a lot of visual clutter.  I rolled several of them over the years.  She had a fun backstory as an Inuit student at University of Paragon who discovered she’d been gifted with powers from the Spirits of the North, etc. I liked the idea that she was wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt for her costume.

She ran briefly with Kay, a Kim Possible scrapper that Margie rolled up.

I always liked the design here for Spangle (or Spangled, in different incarnations). I was much more into the “Civilian Costumes with a Bit of Decor” for the most part, rather than full-body Spandex.  I think I rolled her up as both a Magic-based Tank and as a Dual-Swords Scrapper. Neither went far.

Next to her is Old Saucy Jack, my Jack the Ripper reincarnated-to-make-up-for-his-sins.  Yeah, the broadsword was maybe a bit much, but I liked the red gradient on his white gloves.

Big Lungs was a Sonic/Sonic Defender. I found the power sets boring, but enjoyed the, um, character design.

OFFICER (yes, it actually stood for something) was law enforcement robot piloted by Paragon City’s Police.  Energy Blaster, as I recall. Soloed him for a while, but eventually scrapped him (so to speak) to get the slot back on whatever server it was on.

Snipehunter was another very early solo toon, another Energy Blaster, kind of my answer to Deadshot.

Suzy Atom and Star Protector were an early duo Margie and I ran, very four-color. She was an Energy Scrapper, as I recall, one of the few of those I ever ran. He was a Defender of some sort.

Cetus and Lunulata were Kheldians we rolled up. Never went anywhere, but, for the record …

For a good chunk of time, I ran with one of the on-screen add-ons that someone put together for CoH.  It tracked both buffs/debuff timing (this was before the buff markers flashed), as well as tracking experience and time to level.  This was Psi-clone (looking at the buffs and accolades), about 10 minutes from leveling to 50.

Eventually, the on-screen info provided by the game, plus the lag in this particular tool keeping track of changes between issues, and a general diminution of compulsion to know how long to level, caused me to drop this particular tool.

When you finally hit 14, you got your travel power (for many, many years). Since that was usually while running around in Steel Canyon, you usually celebrated by going to the top of the big statue in the middle of Steel Canyon, right where you leveled up.  Here’s Amorpha and Psi-clone.

Katherine ended up playing more over time, but never enough to warrent her own account. Early days, she’d play around a bit on Margie’s account (later on, on Test, since you could be signed into both).  This was her first character, Kitty Shoulder, a Defender on Guardian whom she got up to Level 6.

I think Protector (under Margie’s account) was one of the servers Kay generated a lot of test characters on …

One time when my folks were visiting, my mom asked what all the fuss was.  I walked her through building a character, Carey, a Fire Blaster. She never played it, but I kept the toon around, just because.

Kheldiel was another concept character, the idea of a Kheldian merging with an Angel, all glowy and hovering and all of that.  It would have worked beautifully, if Kheldians hadn’t been such a PitA to play.

And so, fittingly, we end on an angel …

* * *

And that’s it, a good percentage of the characters I (or Margie) cared about during our several years playing City of Heroes.  Where might they have gone on to?  Who else might have been created?

We’ll never know.

Thanks for your patience … we’ll resume regular blogging here about other games … soon …

In Memorium – CoH – Exalted

Continuing my series of City of Heroes characters, server by server …

Our toons on Exalted were a more recent phenomenon, with the server opened up for play for VIP members only with the introduction of CoH’s Free-to-Play option. We weren’t interested it for the hoity-toity VIP exclusivity so much as it was another server to populate, especially with a variety of new power sets that came out in the last year of the game.

I think we also pushed a bunch of toons onto this server before they turned off new Level Pacts being created. (LPs were one of the greatest concepts in CoH, and I was very disappointed they never got them turned back on).

One problem with Exalted was that it was introduced late enough, and our character there young enough that I don’t have much in the way of photos of them. And Margie didn’t get more than just a couple of characters snapshotted during our last week.  Darn.

I had a half-dozen Jack Byzantine variations scattered across the servers. Not to be confused with John Constantine, the rain-coated smoking magician usually was a Mastermind, especially in this last edition (up to lvl 21) as a Demons MM. Margie’s counterpart was Brimstone Bound, a Brute.

The Grey Haunt was another one I had multiple versions of, the ghost from the 1930s who is out to seek revenge as a Mind Controller (or sometimes Illusion Controller), instilling fear in the hears of others. Air/Wind secondary, as I recall. This one reached 20. He ran with Imperial Jade, a Brute.

We managed to not get pictures of either of Margie’s characters.

Morgaine Darkchilde was just an excuse to create a buxom witch with the new Dark Blast power. Plus the name was fun. She made it to 18, along with her partner, Electric Lass, a Tank.

Golden God was sort of scary fun. He was a scrapper using the short-lived Titan Weapon skill set. He was another scrapper+scrapper combo, working with Golden Temptation. They made it up to 15.  We don’t have a picture of her, unfortunately.

Rifleman was was modeled after Chuck Conner’s TV character of the same name, crossed with a Cowboys-and-Aliens twist, as some interesting gauntlets provided an alien Energy Rifle (blaster, 12).  ER was an interesting combo power set. I wish I’d had more of a chance to play with it. He didn’t bat an eye running with Troll Babe, a Brute. And, again, no pictures.

 

In the 10-and-under set, Bacchante used the new Water Blaster power, combined with power customization, to make it look like she was a Wine blaster. I believe she was paired with Margie’s (unpictured) Minutiae (a Defender).

I also had another version of Velvet, going full-out for the trailer trash look (though reminding me here of Tandy from Strangers in Paradise). She was a SS/Willpower Scrapper, this time out, which was a lot more fun. To go with her was Agent Psiren.

And there’s another version of Tyger-Tyger, the burning-bright fire/fire scrapper. Alas, he was a Red-side character, so unlikely to ever advance anywhere. Ran with El Cid, a controller. They made it to 8.

Unified Fieldman used the steampunk costumes to good effect. He was a Grav/Time controller, which seemed appropriately physical, but never got out of Praetoria. Ran with Divine Retribution, a scrapper, up to 7

Call o’ the Wild was a beast elemental (and Wolves MM). Ran with Chaotic Order, a scrapper.

Last there is Calling Time, one of Margie’s toons (Lvl 12 Defender, obviously with the Time power set).

Some of these may have eventually become big successes, but that clearly hadn’t been thrashed out yet.

Honorable Mention on this server to Shadow Moll (perfect name for a Dark scrapper who had the power “Shadow Maul”) and, along the same lines, another version of Lynne Calodo as a solo Dark/Inv scrapper.

 

In Memorium – CoH – Victory

Continuing my series of City of Heroes characters, server by server …

If Champions was our first, best server home, Victory was where we moved afterwards.  It had some of our top characters, and also represented the period when Going Rogue came out and we generated a truck-load of alts to run through Praetoria. Almost all of those ended up Blue-side after they hit 30.

Rita the Cat and Runt the Dog were modeled after the singing duo in Animaniacs (indeed, that was the name of our SG on Victory).  They both got up to Level 47 as Scrappers — Rita was Claws/Regen, Runt was Dark/Regen, and both used Super-Jump as a travel power.  They were amazingly effective and fun, and we told lots of jokes with them. I would have loved to have gotten them to 50 …

Runt stayed pretty constant in appearance, once the monster/villain costume pieces were out.  (I was never quite sure about the kilt, but …). I was never happy with Rita’s appearance, though, toying with various costume bits and facial features over the years.

Gifted Kid and Special Educator were Level 44 Masterminds.  GK was Robots/Bubbles (very high-tech), while SE was Gangs/Dark (a very dubious teacher).  They were one of the very few Red-side groups we were successful with — the dual-Mastermind powers were just too much swarmy fun, and almost made the game play like a squad-level tactical simulation (with the two actual characters as the heavy weapons from the rear lines).

Bubbles — er, Force Fields — were a greatly underestimated power set.  Not only were they an easy buff for the whole team (especially once CoH allowed you to cast them on one team member and have it apply to everyone), but the push-back-knock-down power was highly effective at knocking most Bosses on their butts. Plus, combined with MM, it was a fire-and-forget combo.

I found Dark to be an annoying Defender power, too, but Margie showed it worked quite nicely with MMs.

Another pair that would definitely have gone to 50 with time.

I’d enjoyed Kitsune-Chan on the run up to 50, as a character, that I wanted to do another one. We took the Praetorian version of her — instead of an Illusion Controller beloved by all, Kitsune-Sama became a bad girl Thugs/Pain Mastermind.  She teamed with a re-rolled (alternate universe) version of Anne Koniki, here a Spines scrapper. They got up to 40, and were definitely on their way to being Heroes of the City.

Pistol Blasters rocked. Mine, Velorio, went to 38 alongside her fellow former Praetorian, Golden Judgement, a Shield Tank.  Velorio was blind, but possessed by magical pistols of vengeance.  Woo-hoo.  We decided ultimately to make the Vigilantes rather than pure Heroes, because we could, but never saw any real effect from that.

We would have eventually taken them to 50, I have no doubt.

Another set of one-time Praetorians, Ms. Crackle was that universe’s version of my solo Electrical Blaster, Miss Crackle — except her suit was set up to make her an Electrical Controller instead.  She teamed up with Positive Force, a Kinetics/Electrical Scrapper.  The two of them were awesomely effective, with their electrical powers basically sucking the juice out of their opponents.  Fun, fun times. This pair would have made it to 50.

Yet another Eliza Dee — this was was rolled up (in Praetoria) as a Super-Strength/Invuln Brute. She ran with Fragile Package (Rad/Kinetics Corruptor). They graduated from Praetoria, but jumped to the Villain side, making it up to 28. They were semi-regularly played.


Since we had done so well with Rita and Runt, we rolled up (when the animal makeup became available) two Brutes to try out along the same vein: Rhett Bull (lvl 26 Axe/Shield) and Phoenix Reburn (lvl 26 Fire/Fire). We colloquially called them “Cow and Chicken”. They worked out very nicely, even if the Brute bar had us running around like lunatics.

I’m really sorry I didn’t get pictures of them in action. In particular, he looked awesome with the axe and shield out.

Another fun pair we would regularly come back to, even if they were Red-side.  I wanted another Fire Blaster, but Margie convinced me to try a Corruptor instead to be more offensive.  We ended up with the horribly spoiled mage Finest Jade (23 Fire/Rad Corruptor), looked after (under orders from her parents) by My Lady’s Keeper (Zombies/Dark? Mastermind),

Shishiko was a Cat-person Thief I ran in a campaign many moons ago. I loved the idea of bringing her to CoH, and tried multiple times over the years. In this instance (probably the most successful), she was a Katana/Super-Reflexes Scrapper, teamed with a re-rolled version of Arctic Sugar, an Ice Defender who was always armoring Shishiko up in Ice … which was a good thing tactically, but sort of spoiled her look. They made it to 21, but never quite “clicked”.


We tried one pair of Arachnos troops — Cyanoglobin (lvl 10 Arachnos Soldier) with Wind-Up Spider a Widow-style Arachnos. They suffered from being Red-side, and not being very … exciting at low levels.

Motivation was a Kinetics/Will Scrapper I soloed up to 14. Kinetics was a fun melee set, but I just wasn’t in the mood for low-level solo scrappers.

We tried playing a three-player combo (with Katherine on F2P), right after the Steampunk costume sets came out.  I created a new Steampunk Mollie Magpie 12 (Grav Controller); oh, Lordy, I loved those wings.  Margie had Victorian Pride, a Scrapper of some sort.  I don’t recall Kay’s toon. We never had much success playing as a trio, and only got up to 12 with them.

Cammie Kandachi was a Lvl 14 Electrical Brute, Red Side.  I just loved the outfit, even if I never went far with her.  Margie had an early version of Anne Kojiki with her, who later would team up (rerolled) with Kitsune-sama (above).

Honorable Mention to (yet another) Jack Byzantine, and Egnarts of Rigel

In Memorium – CoH – Triumph

Continuing my series of City of Heroes characters, server by server …

Triumph was a server we didn’t do a lot on as a pair — except for one very successful duo:

If at first you succeed, then try, try, again the same way. Having had a blast running Psi-clone up to 50 as an Illusion Controller, I rolled up Kitsune-Chan, also an Illusion Controller, except with Radiation as the secondary instead of Empathy.  She was a kitsune Fox Spirit, and so convinced she was the Prettiest One There Is (with plenty of Illusions to back that up).

She was one of the two long-term characters I selected Super-Speed for as a travel power.  There was a lot of visceral thrill to SS (and a Stealth buff), but zones with a lot of vertical movement were a real pain in the butt.

Margie rolled up Ex-Terra, a Spines/Invuln Scrapper.  Aside from the whole fun of Illusion, the AoE of Radiation and Spines both made them extremely formidable.  We dinged to 50 with them with very little trouble.  They were a great pair.

I eventually rolled a somewhat different Kitsune over on Victory.

It’s kind of weird that we had a level 40 pair on Triumph but never really did that much more on the server.

I did make one last effort at the whole Rad Blaster thing with Allie McGordo (an obvious variant on the various Al McGordo’s over time), a Rad Corruptor who eventually made it up to 21 with her companion, Widow Shade. I think they eventually suffered the death of disinterest that most of our Red-side alts suffered.

I have no idea what kind of Controller Mrs. Soccer Mom was.  She only made it up to Level 12 with her counterpart from Margie’s side (Mr. Soccer Dad).

I was always fascinated by Grav Controllers — at least in the “pull in a huge object from another dimension” aspect of their powers.  Molly Magpie was a favorite for her name and costume design, and I soloed with her for a while, but soloing a Controller is a PitA, and she never got beyond 11.

The idea of a Living Egyptian Statue (Stone Tank) with a Pharaonic headpiece named [“They Call Me”] Mister Thebes was way too fun to never write up, but a boring character to solo beyond 6.

Yore was an Axe Tank. I never did anything with him, but I loved his look.

Honorable Mentions to Warbolt, Amethyst Crown, Mister Drake, Unchained Lightning, Panda Attack, and Captain Antares.

Molly Ivins on “City of Heroes”

Well, not actually. But it very much fits.

“Keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cat, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”

— Molly Ivins (1944-2007), “The Fun’s in the Fight,” Mother Jones (May/Jun 1993)

Exit the Heroes

I haven’t played City of Heroes since the announcement it was going down. It was too painful.

Tonight, around 10 or so, Margie said, “Do you want to play CoH, just one last time?” Or something like that.

And I hemmed. And hawed. And …

… well …

… um …

… yeah.

And so we thought about Rita and Runt — could we race up three levels, 47 to 50, in a couple of hours?  (It would have been three hours, in fact.)

But … I wasn’t feeling scrappery.

Hamidon in Atlas Park

We got on instead as Positive Force and Ms. Crackle, a pair we’ve been comfortably pleased with, and were ready to go do some missions …

… when we discovered Victory had a big party going on at the big hill in the middle of Talos.  Big party meaning “The Ghost Ship is stuck there, and there are at least three Monsters spawned at any given time, amidst some dozens of heroes fighting them off.” Yikes.  And, yeah, fun.  We played with them, and then swapped out with some other toons (Velorio, for me). It was lots of intense action fun … until Jade Spider appeared at the top of the hill, doing 1700 hp psychic attacks beyond the borders of the block, and wiping out pretty much everyone around. Repeatedly.

Hrm. Not fun.

We decided, eventually, to sign on with some of our 50s and see what was going on over on Champion.  Nostalgia time.

On with Torchy and Hildy.  And ended up on Talos Hill again, but only for a Rikti Invasion.  Got on teams, and then league, and, when that was done, went Monster Hunting.  Cleaned out two of them from Croatoa — Eochai and Jack in Irons (badges!). Back to Adamastor in Talos.  Couldn’t find Lusca in IP. Took out the Kraken in Perez (oh, Perez — how long ago it was …). Heard about action in Atlas …

… which is where the GM / Devs were lobbing Arch-Villains and Monsters.  We swapped out to Psi-clone and Amorpha, and spent a good hour and change taking on (with scores of our fellows — Atlas 1 and 2 were full up, and Atlas 3 was pretty busy) Drop Ships and Avatar of Hamadon and Lord Recluse and Seed of Hamadon and most of Recluse’ gang and the mad gods from the Shadow Shard and Babbage and … yeah, actual-real Hamidon showed up, too.

“Slip on that Wedding Ring, boys — use it or lose it!”

Eventually the GM had to move to another server. We did a bit more stuff (monster hunting on Monster Island in PI), hopped off to do this and that, but eventually …

Exit the Heroes

… got back on with Psi-clone and Amorpha She had the Peregrine Island bank mission, so we decided to go out that way. Because they were our truest, bestest duo.

And, as the big red messages kept popping up about the 30 minute, 10 minute, 5 minute count-down, we did our damnedest for the people of Paragon City. We went toe-to-toe with Carnies and Malta, foiling a bank robbery, disarming bombs, and subduing and arresting miscreants.

And as we dashed to the next mission, in one final leap, the screen froze, Butch-and-Sundance-like, on Psi-clone and Amorpha, heroes together through time and memory.

-Fin-

The chunks of memory taken up by this game, over the last 7+ years, is amazing.  Geography (every nook and cranny of the Hollows) … Opponents (when faced with mob X, target individual Y) … Group fun, PUG frustration (or exhilaration), friends, family … The Transcendence Trial (in the true meaning of the latter word) … SG leadership (and all the drama attendant thereto) … new rules, improving Quality of Life, added zones … events and arcs and stories and that huge Level 50 DING …

Many thanks to the Devs and all the creative talent behind the game. I was there from Issue 3, and never regretted a single dollar spent. It was a life-enriching experience and a pleasure.

Many thanks to the folks we teamed with here and now and there and again … Scott and Kevin and Lorne and Doyce and Kate and Stan and … many more I’m not remembering, I know.

Many thanks to Doyce, for hooking me on this particular opiate — I could quit any time, right? But I hated ending cold turkey. I appreciate the “first taste”, the companionship, and the encouragement.

Charity at Home is unamused by the final message (that locked up her machine).

And many thanks, of course, to my faithful duo partner, Margie. It sounds weird, but it’s non-trivial playing a game like this with your spouse. There are endless challenges, leadership quibbles, tactical considerations, and, of course (for us) figuring out all of that with multiple alts across multiple story threads and game issues.  It was occasionally challenging, but also always engaging, which is just what makes for a great marriage. Whether it was a game or not.If not for her, I wouldn’t have played nearly as much. And, with her, playing was so much more than just a game.

You always remember your first car. Your first job. Your first SO. Your first house. Your first Doctor. Your first … well, you get the idea.

City of Heroes was my first MMORPG. And while it wasn’t (and won’t be) my last, it will always hold a very special, fundamental, place in my heart.

Office with no view

So, playing stuff on so many servers, we’ve had lots of bases.

But without a doubt the Consortium of Justice base on Champion was the most elaborate.  And my (personal) favorite part was Psi-clone’s office, back in one corner — a desk surrounded by crates and potted plants and stacks of books and gorilla racks, with a lovely view down the hall of an energy unit.

Ah, the glamor of leading a supergroup …

(I used to enjoy going in and adding some small element to the tableau … one more stack of books, or a bottle, or a brain in a jar, or …)

Dear NCSoft: I Hate You

Okay, it’s childish, I know. And rude. And probably not good for my mental or moral health.

But I am still really, seriously, sorely pissed at NCSoft.

Since the announcement about City of Heroes closing down, I haven’t played the game. At all. Simply … couldn’t.

In the past few days, though, I’ve been running around taking screen caps and staring various memorial pages. And I look at all the characters  created — ones I ran up to 50, and ones that were along the path — and it just freaking chaps my hide.

Margie got on tonight (as she was doing her own screen caps) and saw she had a toon that was just short of dinging 50. So she finished it up. She was working on it as I came back from my NaNoWriMo Write-In.

And it was, like, I want to do that. I want to play with these characters, in this world. I want to fiddle around with the combinations we created, enjoy the array of power sets, the different story arcs …

And, of course, I could … until Friday. Sometime … Friday.

Or not, since I have other things I need to do between now and then, and, of course, why freaking bother when it’s all going to go away when the plug is pulled?

(Note: one could consider this a microcosm of the moral / mental considerations of what one evaluates of the reality of the Afterlife. If there is nothing beyond this world, is there a use in going on?  If there’s no CoH after Friday, is there a use in playing the characters? Discuss.)

I try not to wish ill of people, because, as Spider Robinson said, “Vengeance is counterproductive, always. Not to mention the fact it gets your soul all sticky.” But given how the game was terminated, without explanation, at a time when it seemed from all indications that the game was doing okay — not spectacularly, but profitably — and in a way that basically left the fanbase hanging and the dev all out of jobs … I really do wish, sincerely-truly, that anyone in any management position in NCSoft who had anything to do with this decision finds themselves unemployed very, very soon. And stays that way for quite some time.

Yeah, I know, kind of a weak beer curse. But it is, after all, only a game.  But I also am just really frelling pissed at those (I’ll assume) guys, for taking away something I enjoyed, something I (and others) were willing to continue to spend money on, something that’s been a part of my life (and my life with Margie) since almost 8 years ago.

Oh, yeah — if they all suffered a bout of explosive diarrhea, at a maximally inconvenient and embarrassing moment, would be nice, too.

Rrrg.

(Yeah, and, btw, life is too short, and I have no need to ever spend any money ever again on any product from NCSoft — and will, of course, be more than happy to advise others likewise. Eat Hamidon Goo and Die, NCSoft.)

In Memorium – CoH – Virtue

Continuing my series of City of Heroes characters, server by server …

For some folks, Virtue was the server, and it was almost always pretty crowded.

Margie and I never got into Virtue as a pair, mainly because of the crowds/lag.  I think we did some Red-side gameplay, but that was about it for the two of us.

For me, though, it was the Server of Many Solo Toons.  Since what you want when you’re PUGging is a crowd, it seemed the logical thing to do.

On the other hand, since it is a soloist server (for me), I don’t have many in-action screen caps, just (as of today) selection screens.

If there had ever been a solo toon that I would have gotten up to 50, it would have been Miss Crackle.  Smiling and happy as the day is long, she was an Electrical/Energy Blaster (thanks to her hi-tech suit), and was usually pretty welcome in most PUGs.   I got her up to (the magical) 47, with no pictures. Crikey.

 The third there is Molly Morningway, a Fire/Mental Manip Blaster (35). Her backstory was, essentially, she was Harry Dresden’s apprentice, Molly, taking on his mantle after his death, complete with fireballs and Jedi mind tricks, plus his trenchcoat, hat, and a set of chainmail from her mom.  I always enjoyed fire blasters (cf. Torchielle), and while she was a bit more difficult to PUG with (fire’s AoE can make for some exciting times), I still enjoyed it.
 

Lady Zebra was a hoot to play. Taken from a character I wrote up for a NaNoWriMo comic book tale, she was a cranky alien speedster who just happened to look like a terrestrial zebra.  She was a Martial Arts/Regen scrapper (44), and I loved playing her.  The MA kicks done with hooves looked great, and while I usually played supporting roles in duos with Margie, Lady Z gave me a scrapperly outlet when I was feeling in the mood.  I also had a series of tell macros that made a lot of bad combat-related puns that centered on horses, hooves, stripes, etc. Again, a hoot.

Again, one of the very few characters I ever took Super-Speed with — the necessary fit with the character, but a pain in city zones with a lot of vertical to them.

(The one action kick with her above is, sadly, when she had “normal” boots, before the hooves pieces were available.)

Alas, we never got a horse head costume piece, so she had to wear as long-faced a helmet as I could dig up.

Unlikely Ally was another fun concept — the Demon cast out to this world to do good deeds. I loved have a max-height hulked out guy with monster demon wings (a Fire/Fire Tank, I think) on the front lines.  Never got him past 14, since soloing tanks is a bore, but I really liked his look.

Another concept that never went far was Fr. Frank, a Catholic Priest turned Adventurer.  He was, of course, an Empathy/Sonic Defender (18), though, sadly, about the time I rolled him people decided that having Healers on the team was passe. It wasn’t easy cobbling together something that looked like priestly gab, but I was pretty happy with it.

Honor the Flag was another tank — Super-Strength/Invuln — but she got a decent amount of play. Never got her past 19, though, so she’ll be forever hanging out in Faultline.  Got a lot of complements on her uniform, which I thought was fun but nothing special.

These two were relative latecomers.  Tyger-Tyger (“… burning bright …”) was a Fire/Fire Scrapper, which was fun, but I just simply rocked out over this guy’s look (the armor covering up some of the seam weaknesses of the tiger / fur skin.  He made 27.

Woe Nelly was someone I just had to roll a toon for after I thought of the name.  Basically a fear demon, she was an Illusion/Rad Controller.  She made it to 24.

Honorable Mention (built but never run up to 20): Ice of the Tiger, Rose Spectre, Winter’s Darts, Falcon Roja, Molly Mae, Mister Ravenous (another), Scritchy-Scratch, Selene, and Professor Puissant, Truly Unstable, The Blue Shield.

In Memorium – CoH – Freedom

Continuing a server-by-server look at the alts I played in City of Heroes …

In the midst of much drama llamaing, a group of us got together on the  Freedom server and created the “Hostess Heroes” — a series of snack food-inspired characters:

Bear Claws, Ginger Snap, twinkie Kid, Brownie Points, Cheesy Poof, Bazooka Josephine, Mmm Pie, Just Desserts, Oreo of Justice, Fig Neutron, Otter-Pop, Chunky Style, Creme Puff, Divinity Chu, Hot Fries, Pixie Stick, Pork Rind, Die Meiserzinger, Mooon Pie, Staypuft Marshmallow, J A W Breaker, Thin Mint, Kracker Jaxs …

And a few others, including Ho Ho, my Invuln/Axe Tank.  I was convinced that someone would register a complaint over the name, if not the concept, and I’d come back to find myself as UnnamedHero02347.  But nobody every did.

I also learned that Axe was a horribly, horribly slow power. Yes, great at knockdown, but, damn!

Margie played Princess Peep, a Rad/Rad Defender (the yellow woman in the pix above). She was awesome.

We actually had a regular team night (Mondays), and did a fair number of adventures together.  Things petered out just shy of 30, with changing participation and social circles on- and off-line.

Margie and I also created a pair of Cheetos Cheetahs, including my Chester Cheetah (teamed with Margie’s Chesty Cheetah). We never played them much, but they were still a fun concept.

The HH group, after all the other players fell away, became our default SG for additional toons on Freedom.

Maitre D’mon was a demonic French chef (Zombies/Poison Mastermind).  I loved the name. He was part of an abortive CoV counterpart to the Hostess Heroes, named, of course, “Devil’s Food”.  Margie rolled a number of characters for that, including Brussels Sprout (in the pic above, front right) and Frozen Leftovers. She also created a Zombies/Force Field Mastermind named Day Old Shelf who she ran up to 50.

Two throw-away concepts — Margie rolled up a character named Zestra (after a briefly widely-advertised sexual stimulation gel), while I created Satisfied Partner to go with her.

Kwai Havok, a Dark Melee/Willpower Scrapper I wish I’d done more with, noteworthy for both an awful name and being another Dave clone (with a ponytail, no less).  He teamed up, into the mid-teens, with a version of Margie’s Copper Mountain.

For the record, there was an Al McGordo character (Rad Controller) on this server, too.

In Memorium – CoH – Champions

The first in a server-by-server retrospective of City of Heroes characters …

Champions was my first, best server.

Well, I’m not sure if it was first. But it was the best. It’s where we got invited to supergroups first, the Freedom Phalanx — and eventually created our own, the mighty Consortium of Justice, part of the Alliance of Champions coalition, which I eventually became an officer in, and which was tons of fun until we got overrun by drama llamas).

But I digress.

Champions eventually became our secondary server, if only because we’d pushed to 50 those who were going to be.  But it still had some of my earliest (and best) alts.

These are their stories …

Psi-clone was, of course, my Mary Sue.  Hell, I even dressed like him (without the little eyeball logo on the breast pocket, of course) — or, rather, he like me (hey, I have tan slacks, red shirts, and tweed sports coats — go figure).  An Illusion/Empathy Controller, he was my first to hit 50, and he was the head (and chief financier) of Consortium.  Graeme Thorne was a venture capitalist who woke up to find himself with these strange powers; his heroic origin was a mystery (to be revealed in a to-be-completed novel, an extrapolation of the various RP tales I wove around him).

He was someone I ran in enough circumstances that he had a wide set of costumes — his suit, his shirt-sleeves (the most common), his “Indiana Jones” gear, and (for Halloween) his Golden Age awfulness.  (There’s a full-blown Silver Age suit that the PR Department worked up for him. You can get a glimpse of it below …).  After the Terra Volta Trial, he started suffering from added mutations (the glowing eyes, for one).

I loved the Illusion Controller set, and actually ran another hero up to 50 in it. It had damage, control, and pets — who could ask for anything more?  Oh, right … Confusion.  Pure comic gold …

I loved the character so much, I created a version of him in Champions Online. Not the same, of course.  Just a mind blaster, really, in that one.

 

PC ran around mostly duoed with Amorpha, Margie’s Dark/Regen Scrapper.  The two of them were pretty much unstoppable forces of nature — A could stand toe-to-toe with pretty much anyone, while PC kept things under control and cleaned up the riff-raff.  She served as second-in-command of the CoJ.

The fellow pictured there is not Psi-clone, but actually a villain — Mister Thorne — a Soldiers/Pain Mastermind, as I recall.  Yes, he looks a lot like PC.  Yes, he ran the Consortium of Injustice on CoV.  Yes, there was story there …

He was teamed (for all we ever ran them, i.e., not much at all) with Undone. We got them to 17 before getting tired of them.

Torchielle was my fire blaster (Fire/Energy, though the latter was used solely for a “go away!” knockback attack and a couple of buffs). She was the daughter of an energy-based heroine and a dragon, and spent her career dealing with both parts of her heritage (her cloak was from Uncle Fred — literally; and, of course, she eventually manifested dragon wings).

She eventually became (after dinging 50) a local college student, but still active in the hero biz.

Torchy was a classic example (to me) of how you could have a female heroine that wasn’t running around in tights or a bikini.

Torchy usually duoed up with Hildegard, a Fire/Mace Tank.  They were truly an awesome team — Hildy would tank a massive number of bad guys into a corner of the room, Torchy would buffity-buff, and BOOM all those great AoE Fire Blaster powers on their butts.  That just plain old never got old.

Lynn Calodo was a solo toon, a Dark Melee/Invuln scrapper, all gothy-goth and whappity-whappity and with an odd origin that involved winery technology and Crey Industries.

Fazenda was a stage magician who was aided by a Orion-esque energy harness, that let her fly (originally teleport, but that was the world’s most annoying power) and throw energy bolts.

For quite some time she had some odd costume quirks, including an illegal/obsolete set of fishnet stockings before they were available, and a slit skirt that was slit the wrong way.

She was an Empathy/Energy Defender, and teamed up with Araware, a sentient sand creature (and Spine/Dark Armor Scrapper). I always loved Energy Blast, but it was incredibly annoying to whomever you teamed with, due to the knockback.

They were unique in that they were part of Lorne/Mal’s “Storm Knights” SG.  Two of the last active members, in fact. We kept the rent paid …

Velvet Jones was a reformed villain, actually pulled in from an old tabletop RPG game I had.  She’d been just plain “Velvet” there, but that name was taken, so I added “Jones” (not knowing that there was a Saturday Night Live “Velvet Jones” character of a very different nature).

She was a Super-Strength/Invuln Tank, and she usually teamed up with P-siren, a Bubbles/Mind Blast Defender and former Russian spy, also based on the same tabletop game.  Unfortunately, the two of them ended up with bupkis DPS, which eventually brought them to a grinding, non-entertaining halt in the mid-30s.

For a time, though, they were our mains, part of the Freedom Phalanx SG, and so involved in all sorts of very social activities (ah, those were the days).

We eventually recycled the character concepts in much more recent play (Velvet became a SS/Willpower Brute, much more her style), but they never got out of the teens, level-wise.

Velvet was another toon with a lot of costumes — her garish super-hero one above, but a full-body suit (both in black stealth mode, and in more Christmassy colors), as well as a trailer-trash cowboy boots / jeans / tube top, as I eventually rerolled her in. Margie played around a lot with costumes for P-siren, too.

Mr. and Mrs. Azure were a pair designed around humor.  Based on Mr. and Mrs. Blue in the (vastly underrated) movie Undercover Blues, they were actually time travelers, back in modern days to have fun. They enjoyed witty banter and various supergroup/team channel hints that they knew something about the ultimate fate of anyone that they happened to be around.

He was a Martial Arts/Super-Reflexes Scrapper. She … fought crime. [UPDATE: She was a Grav controller]

Mister Ravenous (Super-Strength/Invuln Brute) was a favorite of mine.  When City of Villains came out, he became one of my lead villains in the CoI (“Strength in Numbers … Profit in Cooperation”), a War Wolf gone rogue.  He was impeccable in speech and dress, and had a deep stack of pre-programmed tells all of which had to do with eating his opponents.

Amusingly enough, his suit was always subject to various clipping gaps — which made it look like he was ripping out the seams, which was excellent.

His duo was with Margie’s Charity at Home. Their relationship was unnatural, but Platonic. They eventually made it to 23 before we got tired of Red-side.

There were multiple Al McGordo characters over the years.  The idea of the cowboy who happened to get too close to the radioactive remains of an H-Bomb test was too good to leave alone. It was always about Radiation in one form or another — Rad/Rad Defenders, Controllers, that sort of thing.  He was generally a solo character, never going too far in levels, but I just plain old love the name …

A version of him ran a bit with Christmas Present, one of the best uses of that particular strappy costume I ever saw (Invuln/Ice Tank).  Margie enjoyed pulling her back out on a regular basis to play, eventually getting her to 19.  (Note the last pic, with a copy of Margie’s UI layout.)

Eliza Dee was a Crey experiment who broke free and went off to the Rogue Isles to be on her own, violent, ownsome.  She was modeled after Galatea (the Power Girl variant) clone of Supergirl in the Justice League Unlimited cartoon.  (Galatea was the statue that Pygmalion brought to life; “Pygmalion” was the title of the Shaw play that was adapted as My Fair Lady, with the name of the crude woman brought to civilization of “Eliza Doolittle”).

Anyway, she was a SS/Invuln Brute, who ran around a bit with Margie’s Bacchante, but never amounted to much.  She actually got rerolled on another server, a bit more effectively (to be posted about later).

Unchained Path was created after the CoV costume parts became available hero-side.  She was a Kin/Ice Controller, which meant that she basically slowed the entire bad guy group down to zero.  She had some very angsty, tragic, monastic-obsessive story line, but, ultimately, she was so good at locking down bad guys, in so many ways, it almost became boring.  She hung out with Idzuna, a katana scrapper. They got up to 20.

A WoW Weekend

This was our weekend to play around with World of Warcraft a bit, as a couple.

Margie’s key impression: “It’s Disney LotRO.”

Which has a lot of truth to it, except, of course, that given the order of release one should instead characterize LotRO as “Tolkien WoW”.  That said, there are a lot of similarities between the two games in terms of engine and screen layout and mechanics and all. The art style in LotRO is a lot more realistic, and the Tolkien-based storyline lends a bit of panache to the proceedings, but …

(Margie is suggesting I give LotRO another try.)

So Les and I leveling up characters to 15 in two decent-length sessions were one thing. When Margie and I tried it, we ran into immediate problems with limits on Starter Edition (F2P) accounts. The main problem being: Starter Edition characters can’t initiate groups. So if you have two Starter Edition people playing, they have to play as solo characters running around together. Which makes mission completion more lengthy and complex, and creates real problems when you (virtually) turn around and you can see where the other person is.

Only the fact that we were in the same room made it feel viable.

I’m sure Blizzard has good reasons for the restrictions, given the attacks and hacks and exploits that Black Hats have had, but it did make it more difficult.

Also, we have problems in Panderia, with both of us phased separately on the same server, making it even less viable for us to play together.

That led to a decision Friday evening to go ahead and upgrade my account to a paid subscription — $20 gets the Battle Pack with a couple of expansions in it (handwaves specifics), and a month of play. With that, I could take on the “mentor” role that Les did for me, and we figured at a minimum we’d get $20 of entertainment for the two of us.

Well, one fly in the ointment. Blizzard / Battle.net immediately charges your card, but doesn’t immediately make you a subscribed member. They claim it can take up to 72 hours to validate that you aren’t an Evil Spammer or Despicable Gold Farmer or something.

So we spent Saturday and Sunday doing awkward paired solos, running a pair of humans up to 8 or 9, and then a pair of night elves up to 11.  It was only on late Sunday night that I was able to invite Margie to a team (though some of the other features had kicked in before then).

Net-net, I had a good time, and I think (glances her way) that Margie did, too.  The starter realms seem to be fairly linear in their quest paths, but it seems there is plenty to do after getting out from that.  The biggest problem I see if we move forward is figuring out which of the very kind guild offers we’ve received from various friends to take advantage of.

Meanwhile, now that I’m a paying player, I’ve been able to formally invite Margie in (using a different email addy), which means that I can take advantage of those “recruitment bonuses” that Blizzard is offering. Which means rerolling the toons Margie was already playing, but that’s just a weekend’s worth.

So, for the moment, WoW seems to be on the play list.  Still other games out there we want to try, however.