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.

Looking for Another Game: World of Warcraft

Yeah, I know.

WoW has been sort of the EVERYBODY’S PLAYING IT, SO YOU SHOULD PLAY IT megalithic giant that people either love, or love to hate, or both. Maybe it’s still cool or maybe it’s not, but it still has 9 million subscribers or players or some metric that means a lot of people play it.

I dabbled briefly with WoW over at Lee and De’s house, oh, about seven years ago (while trying to decide if this new “City of Heroes” was thing was where I wanted to be, when I heard all these great rumors about “World of Warcraft”).  Under Lee’s tutelage I rolled up a Tauran warrior and went hallooing off into the wilderness.

And, about an hour later, decided I’d had enough cross-country racing when I was in junior high, so I darned well didn’t need it for my MMORPG. Plus, kinda dull and boring missions. Plus weird stuff about being dead and either having to run (again) back, or wake in the graveyard and have something bad happen to your stuff, or something.

WoW became the online gaming Microsoft (or IBM or Apple, depending on your hi-tech era of Nine Hundred Pound Industry Gorillas), and I enjoyed making fun of it and not giving it a second thought.

Until Les, of Stupid Evil Bastard fame, offered, in my CoH Grieving, to introduce me to the game and escort me from first level.

So … WoW is free and pretty un-gimped up to Level 20. So, good for toying with.

And having someone experience to walk me through (chatting via Skype) worked out okay, though, to be honest, I think I could have figured most of it out.  WoW uses a lot of industry standards (many of which, in fact, it probably set) in terms of interface and the like.

We rolled up a couple of Pandarens because, well, who wouldn’t? I played a Hunter, Les a Monk.  My female Pandaren was nicely zaftig. Les opined his male one actually mirrored his own body structure.

And, y’know what? I had fun.  The basics are pretty familiar, the intro zones in Pandaria are nicely laid out, with good stories. I like the graphics. It seems like they’ve filed off some of the dullness and grindiness that the game used to have for beginners.  We played for a couple of hours, dinged to 6th level, and parked it (I had other plans), and I really enjoyed the mix of missions and activities. And the setting /story was also quite nice.

Too early to apply my checklist, but things look fairly promising.

I think I’d like to play some more. I don’t know if it’s The Game I’ll Be Playing, but I definitely want to play more (and get Margie trying it out, too).

Not sure if I should be thanking Les, or plotting some dark and bitter vengeance toward him … but I’ll settle for a thanks for the moment.

Looking for Other Games: Torchlight II

This isn’t really an MMO — though it does have the capability of being multi-player.  Torchlight II is a Diablo-style isometric third person shooter, set in a fantasy realm.  There’s a veneer of missions and story, but really it’s about going around and hacking / slashing / shooting / blowing up various bad guys Real Good.  Plus you get a pet.  The characters are somewhat customizable, and it’s generally fun.  There’s a free demo that I’ve gotten multiple hours of playtime from, so you can certainly try things out.  The networkable version requires all of $20.

I can see Margie and me buying copies of this and duoing up to just do mindless combat now and again.  But it’s not what I’m looking for in a more interesting MMO.

Looking for Another Game: Dungeons & Dragons Online

So, our first serious look at something to replace CoH. DDO has been out for a while, and seems to be doing decently.  It has a limited (to level 20, I believe) F2P model, with microtransactions galore.

Pros

  1. Graphics appear competent.
  2. If you know D&D 3.5, this is a simulation of it.
  3. Quests, maps, all that, seem decently crafted, at least in the initial island area. (I’ve read things in the “real world” behave a bit differently).
  4. Duoing seems possible, esp. with hirelings to fill in the party’s functional gaps. (The latter is what I’ve read.)  It’s also a lot easier with both of us in the same room.
  5. Having fun.

Cons

  1. Two toons, but you can buy more.
  2. Paper dolls limited to heads (facial expressions, a few scars, decent number of hairstyles and colors, skin colors, eye colors).  Costumes determined by swag you pick up.
  3. I can see that encumbrance is going to be an issue. Plus I can see it measuring weight, too, which is even worse.
  4. If you don’t know D&D 3.5, there’s a lot conceptually here you’ll be floundering with.
  5. The initial tutorial system doesn’t really help.  For example, I’m a cleric. While I got some basic drill on “here’s how you hit things,” I got nothing on the spells I have, how they relate (or differ from) Wizard and Sorcerer spells, what (if any) components they take, cool-down periods or mana usage or anything like that.  Feeling my way through, and I’m actually passingly familiar with the system.
  6. Apparently the entire min-max / twinky / feats and multi-classing mess (or opportunity) that 3.5 was is possible here. That’s actually a pro, if you’re into that.  But it’s a bit daunting checking out the boards and seeing, “Why, yes, of course you can do that, if you have the particular build here that I’ve taken.”  That’s not necessarily different from some of the extremes of the CoH boards, to be sure, but for a noob, it’s not a positive thing.
  7. Advancement seems slooooooow.  Also, it seems easy for a duo to get out of sync.

I don’t feel like I can give it a grade yet against my checklist, but we’re both interested in playing after Margie gets back from her trip, so that’s good news.

What I’m looking for in an MMO (redux)

Yeah, I know I’ve talked about this before, but it came up in conversation during date night with Margie.  “What three things,” she asked, “are you really looking for from a game?”

I hemmed and hawed, and we discussed, and this is the (not quite three) list it boiled down to. It’s a bit less mechanics-oriented than the previous one, and more functional:

  1. I need to feel heroic.  Jogging everywhere in the world? Doing boring grind missions? Imperiled by battling three opponents?  That’s not feeling heroic. (Note: this doesn’t necessarily mean “super-hero” or “comic book hero”.)
  2. Duo-friendly. A big part of my gaming life is playing with Margie.  A game that makes it difficult for us (and usually just us) to play side-by-side, due to different start points, or poor leveling / sidekicking setups, or whatever, is going to be a frustration to us.  (Heck, I remain irked at CoH for quashing Level Pacting.)
  3. A variety of content / replayability. I don’t want to feel railroaded through just one course of action. I want parallel ways of gaining experience and exploring the world and so forth.
  4. Well-written content. I don’t mind humor, but overall I want to take the story seriously.
  5. Alt-friendly. For whatever reason, Margie and I are both alt-aholics.  We like to try out different character types and combinations.  We’d like to play something (in conjunction with requirement #3) that doesn’t require us to delete characters in order to roll up new ones.
  6. Soloable. Though we game together a lot, sometimes we like running solo, just to try something new, or because the other person isn’t around or doesn’t feel like gaming.  (This tends to be tied a lot to #4.)

So that’s more than three, but those are the important things I’m (still) looking for.

Dollars and ZENts in Champions Online

ZEN does not make me relaxed and contemplative, I'm afraid.

“ZEN” is the pseudocurrency that Perfect World is using across all of their games.  Which is very nice, but some of the “microtransactions” it enables are not so micro.

1 ZEN = 1 cent (USD)

$50.00 = 5,000 + 300
$30.00 = 3,000
$20.00 = 2,000
$10.00 = 1,000
$5.00 = 500

So you only get a discount break in $50 increments (where you get $53 worth of ZEN).

But what does that give you?

So we were looking at our different options here, if we want to continue playing CO.

A F2P account gets you a soul-cramping 2 character slots.  Worse, they are restricted slots — you are limited to a one of 10 canned archetypes / power paths, scattered amongst the five roles (ranged, tank, melee, hybrid, support). Another 2 dozen or so are locked.  Each of those is about 1125 ZEN, say $11.  So if you want a blaster, you can get a fire, bow, or rifle blaster, but not an electricity or TK or etc. blaster without ponying up the bucks.

As well, those power sets need slots to go into, beyond that initial 2.  You can buy slots 2 at a time, for $14 ($7 each).

But if you want a Freeform slot — letting you mix and match power paths and primary/secondaries — that costs a whopping $50 (on sale this weekend for a low $25).

It’s hard to put this cleanly into CoH terms.  Paragon Market Points were 1.25 cents each.

  • Each player had a dozen character slots on each of a dozen servers.  144 character slots, right there.  Additional slots (for a given server) were $4 each (in packs of 5). But each of those slots could be almost anything.
  • While not all archetypes were F2P, most were (everything except Mastermind, Controller, Kheldians and Arachnos). Those were available for $15. Further, within all the archetypes, nearly all powers were available — so if you were a Blaster you could be any of the dozen different types of blasters, Primary and Secondary.
  • Additional new power sets were $10 (800 pts), about equivalent of the archetype power sets in CO — but that $10 in Nature Affinity, for example, could be used for a Defender, Controller, Corruptor, or Mastermind.
  • The combos of Primary and Secondary (plus Pool powers) provided much more freedom than the fixed archetypes in CO.  While not quite as freeform as the Freeform slots on CO (which lets you make pretty much any sort of combo you want), they are still much more flexible setup than most.

Bottom line, CoH was a much better bang-for-buck than CO in this category.

Beyond that, we have “real” account full of 8 characters, levels 9-19, all of whom are considered “freeform” by CO (back in the day there was no penalty, and lots of discussions of the best secondary powers to take with primary sets, with the few canned archetypes of the period considered substandard).  There doesn’t seem to be a way to access those characters as a F2P character (you can only buy new freeform slots, at $50/pop, not activate old ones), unless we re-up our subscription at $15/mo.  And, honestly, not feeling the impulse to do that yet.

Trying Champions Online again (Part 2)

Comments:

  1. For all that the NCSoft launcher used to hang up on my machine while not in use, it did do a fabulous job of updating content while I was away. It seems really primative to have the CO launcher start off by saying, “Nope, can’t play now, gotta download N mb of updates first, sorry.”
  2. Ran through the tutorial again, and, yeah, a lot of the side missions have been removed for some reason (to keep people from leveling up too fast?).  And it still seems like there’s a lot of info that isn’t covered well.
  3. The character creator has a tendency to let you pick things you can’t, and then not warn you before you try and save your character.  Hilarity and “character creation failed” messages ensue, dropping you back to square 1.
  4. While I like the UI assistance for finding where your next mission is, I find the ability to end up with many, many missions to be distracting (especially since they seem to age so quickly).
  5. I like that you are not necessarily stuck on rails down a mission. On the other hand, it sometimes seems like there are too many directions to go — random new contacts pop up (while you still have a full tablet of missions), and often your missions send you to contacts (or back to contacts) offering you a few more missions.  Option paralysis …
  6. I’m already finding the uneven application of (sometimes dubious) humor to be irksome.  Not that CoH was unrelentingly grim or serious (e.g., the names of the detective pairs in each of the zones), but its humor was a raised eyebrow or perhaps a wink while taking the drama seriously. CO does all but a fourth-wall breaking mugging for the camera.  E.g., the cut scene meeting of all the criminal gangs in the West Side with the mystical Oriental villain being unable to pronounce “Millennium” …
    7. Force of Will - a character I'm not playing because I'm stuck in F2P.
  7. Travel powers are immediately available — but the fact you get slowed to a crawl if you draw any aggro makes anything except flight (and sometimes not even that) a royal pain in the ass.  Which is a shame, because Superspeed is much more practical in Millennium City than in Paragon (or the Rogue Isles) … and the Acrobatics travel power is awesome, visually.  (Margie is really disliking Superjump.)
  8. Action is faster than in CoH, which is probably a good thing.
  9. The userid/login security stuff is … not as friendly as it could be. Between Cryptic vs Perfect World IDs, and verifying computers, and all that (and, yes, I understand the whys and wherefores), Margie’s had a heck of a time getting in to even play. Which is not encouraging.
  10. I like build-up powers, and spew-out powers. It’s a nice mechanic. I am seriously unfond of having to “block”.  Really.
  11. There seem to be a dozen different leveling mechanisms — powers pop in, attributes to powers can be added, new little extra powerlet stuff can be incremented.  It all feels very nickel-and-dime … incrementing a few percentage points here and there with no real sense of major achievement when you level,  just nudges and tweaks to what you have.  And maybe part is the F2P (which doesn’t let me choose non-railroaded classes), but that would make things even worse.
  12. On the other hand, it’s nice to be able to level without being at a trainer.
  13. Sure seems like the population is a lot heavier. Which on the one hand is encouraging. And on the other hand makes going to hero-populated areas (Renaissance Center, the Power House) irksome.
  14. Inventory slots.  Multiple and different types of inventory slots.  Yes, CoH had slots of various sorts … but if I was on a mission and was picking up stuff, or even being given temporary powers … it didn’t impact anything else I was doing.  I’ve never liked inventory / encumbrance limits, in any system, and CO seems to have them a-plenty.
  15. I do still like the graphics, though fading over range seems much more obvious than it was in CoH.

I’m finding CO moderately entertaining, but not gripping.  Part of that may be because we’re struggling with the constraints of the F2P system. Perhaps it’s the rampant (voluntary) P2P in the streets (heroes? really?). I dunno.

I’m enjoying what I’m doing, but am I enjoying it as much as I’d like to? Or as I (cough) did with CoH?  No … not really.  And does that make me want to renew my subscription (and access all those other characters I had rolled)?  Not … sure yet.

Trying Champions Online again

Looking for our City of Heroes replacement (mutter mutter mutter), Margie and I loaded up Champions Online.  Rather, I loaded it back up; Margie still had it on her machine from our last go-around.

Very initial thoughts:

  1. We are former subscribers. Trying it F2P, we eventually found it a lot easier to simply create new accounts. That’s because our accounts are “full” of our previous characters — which are unplayable as F2P players because they use freeform archetypes.  CO doesn’t make this very clear up front or during the whole process.
  2. It was also kind of messy distinguishing between our old Cryptic Online accounts and the new Perfect World accounts, esp. since sometimes you can use either, other times you have to use the PW account, and in both cases they really don’t want you to have the same display name for the forums and onscreen as your account name, and both are limited to just characters and numbers, no spaces or dashes or underscores.
  3. The new character tutorial has been trimmed down a bit in terms of what adventures are available during the Qularr invasion. That got us out of it faster, but also lost some of the more fun bits.
  4. There’s also still that sense of mad rush with attackers attacking even as little tutorial bits pop up to help you through what you’re desperately trying to mash keys to avert.  Blocking wasn’t really discussed, and the whole need for energy buildups, etc., either flashed by without my spotting any info about it.
  5. There are some nice on-screen button prompts for things you can do in proximity (Talk to X, Open Door Y).
  6. There’s additional narration / dialog to frame the whole invasion and all, which is nice. On the other hand, we lose the big salute/parade at the end, which is sad.

We didn’t get much beyond that in our first play with two newly-rolled characters (fire blaster and strength tank). We’ll continue trying, though. I’m anticpating how the level-up process has evolved, if at all, as well as how level-balanced things work out in the non-instanced field of play.

So, what about those other super-hero MMOs?

The super-hero genre is one that I enjoy a lot. It allows a lot of individual variation  in very dramatic fashion for the various toons. The thought did occur to me that, in moving from City of Heroes, I might think about shifting over to Champions Online or DC Universe Online again.

Then I checked my old posts on the blog:

Transitions (Mar 2010)

I just came the the realization that I have next to zero interest in ever playing Champions Online again. Which ticks me off to no end since (as I’ve said a dozen times) there are so many things about the game I like. I just find the overall experience an awful, not-terribly-fun grind.

Because occasionally I feel like I should post something other than tweets (Feb 2011)

Never signed up for DCUO after doing the beta stuff — bright and shiny but annoying non-instanced missions and overly combat-oriented.

Mr. Kiss-Kiss Bang-Bang (Dec 2011)

  • Champions Online: She was bright and shiny and promised so much but gave back so little.  We had some fun times, but ultimately she was never someone I could settle down with.
  • DC Universe Online:  Another try at rekindling an old relationship, but it was just too much of the same old grind.  I keep thinking I might give her a call some day, have some coffee, no strings attached, but I can never quite work up the interest.

    • Margie had an extensive post on CO experience here. And I had one here.

    So … for anyone who’s been playing those, has any of that criticism actually changed? Are these actual games we should consider picking up again?

    Guess I’m still in that “Depression” stage

    Or maybe the bottom line is that advancement in CoH was more about the achievement  and reaching the goal than the journey. Because I confess I am utterly uninterested in hopping onto CoH and doing any gameplay.  Which I feel like a kick in the gut whenever an opportunity that would have previously been, “Hey, I’ve got some time, maybe I’ll do a bit of CoH” or “Hey, Honey, want to do some Game?” comes up.

    I have gone in to take some character screencaps, and I want to do a server-by-server “In Memorium” set of posts.  But right now — I can’t bring myself to go in and play with any of these people who will be evaporating in 2+ months.

    City of Heroes and the Five Stages of Grief

    As formulated by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross relating to how people react to terminal illness or to any other personally catastrophic news.  I saw all of these in the CoH community since the word came down yesterday that the game was being shuttered — including all of these comments or variants thereof (well, not much of #5 yet).

    1. Denial — “NOOOOOOO!” “I don’t believe it!” “I feel numb.” “This makes no sense.” “It’s a fake to increase interest in the game.” “Someone else will buy the game and keep it running.”
    2. Anger — “It’s not fair!” “NCSoft is screwing us!” “I’ve put all this time and effort in and now they just take it away? Unacceptable!” “Why are they doing this? I demand an explanation!”
    3. Bargaining — “Isn’t there anything we can do?” “Petition NCSoft to keep the game running!” “Petition NCSoft to make the game open source so someone else can keep it running!” “Petition Sony to buy the game!” “Can’t they just let the servers run without any extra change or growth in the game?”
    4. Depression — “I’m never going to play a game again.” “”Nothing will ever be as good as CoH was.” The game will be over soon, so what’s the point of playing it with any of my characters?” “I’ll never be able to think of how I met my spouse in the game without being sad now.”
    5. Acceptance — “It’s going to be okay.” “There are other games out there — what is everyone else moving to?” “It’s had a good run and I’ve enjoyed it. Time to move on.”

    On why NCSoft is killing off City of Heroes

    It’s the money, stupid.  The game is doing okay, but in context, it’s not in NCSoft’s interest to keep it up and running.

    Based on their Investor Relations report (PDF) of August 2012:

    1. NCSoft considers CoH an MMOG, which has a life cycle of 5-10 years.  Introduced in 2004, that makes CoH 8 years old, close to end-of-life. (p. 4)
    2. CoH revenues are a tiny fraction of NCSoft’s income, vs. Aion and Lineage 1 and 2 — about 2% of sales. (p. 7 and 13)
    3. North America and Europe sales are a tiny fraction of NCSoft’s revenue (p. 13)
    4. CoH saw a tiny increase in sales over the last year, but as  The Escapist notes, that with the change-over to the blended business model “City of Heroes Freedom,” which was meant to significantly increase revenues — which didn’t happen. (p. 13)
    5. NCSoft profit and net income is way down. (p. 20)
    6. Company focus is on two big launches this year, Blade and Soul and Guild Wars 2. (p. 16-18)

    Bottom line (so to speak), City of Heroes and, more importantly, Paragon Studios, was a distraction for a company in financial trouble and focused on upcoming releases. The revenue stream was small and going nowhere.  From a purely business standpoint, it makes all the sense in the world for them to pull the plug.

    But it still sucks big-time for the players.