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.

    What I’m looking for from my next MMORPG

    Okay, while I’m still in mourning about City of Heroes, I want to set down what’s made it so special, in a way that looks forward to the next MMO Margie and I get involved in.

    Because, yes, while there are any number of pragmatic reasons why this provides a good opportunity to kick the habit and turn all those hours into something more “productive” … playing CoH has been such a very nice thing for Margie and me to do together that I want to maintain that experience. Though, obviously, sadly, in a different game.

    So … here’s what I’m looking for the next thing (and, it goes without saying, I’m looking for specific suggestions from my vast reading audience as to what that next thing should be based on that).

    1. It needs to be soloable and duoable. That’s how we play. If the significant content and advancement requires you to belong to a guild of some sort in order to access it, that’s not for us.  I don’t mind mass events or the options to do such a thing, but this is about Me and Us time.

    2. I’d prefer minimal grinding. One thing CoH got away from over the years were a lot of the “Go shake down 20 Council and find out their next target” kind of things. Those missions still existed, but they were a minimal part of the action in more modern content.  That sort of busy-work was one of the things I disliked about LotRO, too (“Collect 30 Neek-a-breeker wings! Great. Now go out and collect 40 Fruit Bat Eyeballs!”).  That leads into …

    3. I want to be a big damn hero. This was another place where I always felt LotRO fell short. I never felt heroic, in the sense of being a person of extraordinary skill and ability, able to do incredible things (and faced with incredible things to do).  Sure, I was a cool character with a sword, but I was fighting other guys who were also cool and who could take me down at any moment. I’m not asking for a walk in the park, but feeling extraordinary, not just another guy with a sharp axe, is important to me. Travel powers are definitely a part of that (something LotRO has partially solved with more pony-power options) — if I spend the majority of my time running across the landscape to the next content, I’m not being heroic, just persistent. And bored.

    4. I’m an alt-aholic. The system has to have a high “paper doll” factor in terms of letting me try a wide array of both appearances and abilities.  And I don’t want to be limited to just a few of those as my sole build(s) (“Man, I’d really like to try this character concept, but I only get four slots so I’d have to drop someone else.”) And, by definition, that means a high replayability factor in terms of content and approaches to tackling it.

    5. Instanced missions are okay. In fact, preferred. One thing I always disliked with Champions Online was the “Okay, go defeat XYZ” … who is standing in the open and thus gets gacked by a series of people on the same mission and you have to stand around and wait for your turn to do it.  Going through a mission door and being on our own to defeat the bad guy(s) is a big improvement, in my opinion.

    6. Decent scaling. I seem to recall LotRO had (has?) this problem — a very narrow band of mission levels suitable for your character. Take one a level or two too hard, and you’re dead meat. A level or two too easy and it’s drop-dead boring.  CoH, over the years, really added a lot of flexibility to tackle content above and below with appropriate scaling, as well as being able to set global difficulties for your character (bump up/down the opponents X levels, multiply the villains X much).  As a sidebar to this, appropriately scaled missions are also important — Champs Online felt way too uneven, as though one mission was way easy, then the next nigh-impossible.  I like a constant and consistent challenge.

    7. Not so much with the crafting, please. Though I eventually got used to it on CoH and enjoyed playing games with it, in most systems crafting is (a) a time sync, (b) a way to keep you from exhausting content, and too often (c) a requirement for advancement. I don’t like any of those options.  If I want to worry about a day job, I’ll worry about my real one. This was another place where LotRO failed for me.

    8. I’m investing my time and, probably money. Likewise, please. So now I’m skittish about getting involved in a game only to have it yanked out from underneath me.  Call it commitment anxiety.  My inclination is for a game with something of a track record, and certainly from a company that’s doing well.

    9. Trying things out. I don’t mind a subscription model. In fact, I’ve kind of liked that with CoH.  I wouldn’t mind starting out on a F2P format and be able to graduate to a playing player once I’m convinced the game style is what I want.  But I’m open to a variety of options, as long as it’s not too microstransactional (“Welcome to Level 5. Please deposit 35 BlastCorp Bucks to continue playing!”).

    10. I’m looking for RP Lite. In line with the Solo/Duo thing (and the Alt-aholic thing) above, I don’t need something that’s highly social, but I would like to stand out a bit in a crowd, and have a backstory concept that’s reflected in how I can behave. I want to feel at least some level of role-playing in the design and naming of the characters. If every toon is simply a set of characteristics and standard abilities, and there’s a sense of  “Oh yeah, well, every Blue Elf is like every other Blue Elf,” then it’s just mixing and matching numbers and not nearly as much fun.

    I’m not particularly tied to any genre — I’ve done a lot of supers, obviously, but fantasy or SF or whatever are certainly viable settings.

    I suspect it’s not going to be easy to find these things all in one bundle. They’re what I’ve loved most about CoH, and obviously no other game is going to have quite the same level set in these attributes. But, as I said, options and opinions are welcome.

    The End of City of Heroes

    Well … dammit.

    This morning we announced that Paragon Studios will be taking to the skies of City of Heroes for the last time.

    In a realignment of company focus and publishing support, NCsoft has made the decision to close Paragon Studios. Effective immediately, all development on City of Heroes will cease and we will begin preparations to sunset the world’s first, and best, Super Hero MMORPG before the end of the year. As part of this, all recurring subscription billing and Paragon Market purchasing will be discontinued effective immediately. We will have more information regarding a detailed timeline for the cessation of services and what you can expect in game in the coming weeks.

    That … just … SUCKS.

    It’d hard to express in words how much City of Heroes has meant to me.  It was the first MMORPG I ever played.  I met folks there. I ran a supergroup of friends and acquiaintances.  I gave a sub to my wife for Valentines Day, and the two of us have logged weeks worth of  time over the years.

    I came in at I3, when things were in a nascent stage.  I remember mad dashes through the Hollows … go-hunt-killing Skulls in Kings Row … endless jogs through Steel Canyon to the missions before hitting that magic Level 14 when you could get a travel power …

    The expansion of content, of character types and powers, of Quality of Life features kept it all fresh and new, yet still familiar.

    We had a stable of characters on different servers, spanning everything from toons in their teens (level-wise) to retired Level 50s, and in an array of powers and synergies that playing the same missions back to back (e.g., the Signature Story Arcs) never felt like a dull grind, but a series of wargames with differing conditions.

    I wrote a novel. Well, half a novel.  That I still plan to get back to.

    We tried different games — DC Universe Online, Champions Online, Star Trek Online, and (and Margie and Kay still play this, too), Lord oft the Rings Online.  But we always came back to CoH.

    It made us feel super. Especially together.

    And now … after, what, 8, 9 years? … it’s going away.

    The team here at Paragon deserves special praise for all that we have accomplished over the last 5+ years. These developers are some of the most creative and talented people in the gaming industry. By now, we’ve all been given this news internally, but to anyone who may be reading this message after the fact; know that your hard work and dedication has not gone unappreciated or unnoticed. To any potential studios looking to grow your team; hire these people. You won’t regret it.

    The Dev community on CoH, including their accessibility through the forums, was always one of the cool aspects of CoH.

    To our Community,

    Thank you. Thank you for your years of support. You’ve been with us every step of the way, sharing in our challenges, encouraging us to make City of Heroes better, more than everyone else thought it could be. We couldn’t have come this far without you. I implore you all, focus on the good things of CoH and Paragon Studios. Don’t dwell on the “how” or the “why”, but rather join us in celebrating the legacy of an amazing partnership between the players and the development team.

    Thank you, and I’ll see you in the skies, one last time.

    I don’t blame the Paragon Studios folks. The direction for this is clearly about NCSoft. I’ll be curious as to what news comes out about what’s driving this decision.

    Regardless, it’s sad. Depressing. Grief-making. Like finding out the restaurant you liked so much, where you go every few weeks, where you know the staff’s names, where you proposed to your wife … is not only closing, but being torn down for a WalMart.

    Ugh.

    COH Signature Story Arcs

    Okay, I admit it — I have a bit of Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior viz City of Heroes. Such that, as the various Signature Story Arcs have come out, I’ve been insistent on our running through them with all of our alts who qualify.

    Which, given that they tend to ramp up in level, has limited the scope.  We have 13 “high-level” alt pairs that we run — defined, loosely, as level 25 or higher.  Some are Legacy Consortium Heroes on Champion, and a few high-levelers on a some other servers. Several were part of the Great Praetorian Boom. Still other were the Final Level Pact Rush.

    But 25 or so only gets you (on the Pandora’s Box SSA) so far.  I think the first installment is level 30, and the second was 35. The third (just out) is 40+, which restricts us to six duos to run (we’ve now done four), though we hae twom ore that are in the 38-39 range and could be advanced with a bit of focus.

    What’s actually cool about the SSAs is that they play quite differently depending on who’s going in on them. We have an array of variations in our duos (scrapper-or-brute/troller of various flavors, blaster-or-corruptor/tank ditto, scrapper duos, mastermind duos) as well as variations on their difficulty settings.  Given that we can usually plow through one of the SSA installments in an hour (after the first hero and villain run-throughs, where we actually read the dialog), that’s not too bad a way to kill an evening.

    The current installment (2.3) is actually pretty darned good.  Malta is always a challenging mix of firepower and debuffs, but the final installment does a nice job triggering some status quo changes that are due out with I24.

    I look forward to the third SSA. And, as well, to our herd of level 5-20 duos we have growing up on Exalted qualifying for these adventures …