Wing_Leader

Or thought about it at all.

A character's origin is a metagame backstory element that should have no mechanics implications unless the system can be flexible enough to handle all the myriad variations players will come up with. But I've not yet seen a computer-driven game that can figure what to do when a player wields a super-tech weapon that uses a magical crystal that taps into another dimension as a power source. It is within those ambiguities that player creativity thrives, but which gives crude computer engines fits.

The Well Isn't Insane, It is General Patton

Oh, and as for the Well's present behavior, I would say it is only as "insane" as any good military commander. In times of war, which I would argue this is, identifying, rewarding, and facilitating those who show an ability and willingness to effectively wield great power is a practical military necessity.

I understand your skepticism. It is human nature, I suppose. Thinking outside the box is not for everyone. The first step in creating a new reality is shedding the limitations (on creative thought) imposed by the present one.

Perhaps implicit in the definition of casual vs. hardcore is the notion that casual players won't make doing the new DA content the sole focus of all their play time, i.e., they won't be grinding it, but rather interspersing it with lots of other missions/activities. Whereas hardcore players will focus on it with grim determination and do nothing else until they are tier 4 in all their slots. The 20-hour reward gate on the DA content will frustrate this kind of hardcore player, who would otherwise happily grind the new DA solo, as opposed to the iTrials, for four hours a day because they don't want to deal with 15-23 other yahoos ruining their fun.

It amazes me how many people think that good game design (and in particular, combat simulation systems) can somehow magically happen without a thorough grasp of math. *shakes head*

Isn't this the danger of playing in someone else's sandbox? You fill in details with your own conceptions and interpretations, taking advantage of the conceptual space left by all the unsaid things in the game's official canon (early on), and then one day those details do get elaborated upon and now everything you've come up with stands in conflict with the newly established canon. Wasn't this sort of thing inevitable?

I guess some things are just better off left unspecified, like where superpowers "come from". Flexibility here is so fundamental to character origin stories that it is probably the one thing they should never have elaborated upon. But they did. And now we are required to ignore the new canon in order to preserve our character concepts, or retcon our character concepts to fit the new reality. For anyone who already was ignoring the Well and/or the whole Incarnate concept, this is no big deal. For everyone else, disregarding everything that is coming down the pike for Incarnates is going to become harder and harder and less satisfying with every update.

I can't help but think you are effectively saying that the devs didn't really know what they were doing. That, like a broken clock that is still right twice a day, they got a few things right almost by accident, rather than by design (which they were completely ignorant of). I can find plenty of evidence to support this, at least in my own mind, but I am surprised to see a pseudo-redname state it, more or less, outright.

I'm whining because one of my favorite villain groups has been squandered as a narrative device. That's not quite the same as "not getting the spotlight all the time," but maybe I'm the only one who sees the not-so-subtle distinction.

And you're right, I3 was a long time ago, but the impact of that issue is still being felt in terms of the relative irrelevance the villain group retains to this day (I would applaud their appearance in the ITF if it weren't for the fact that it feels so incongruous to me). It is hard to "get over" something that continues to chafe every time I do a mission involving the Council.

I happen to agree.

However, the more insidious problem, to my mind, is that so many folks think grinding is not only normative play, but desireable as well. As if without "the grind" there is no MMO. Well I'm here to say that grinding is not an axiomatic requirement of an MMO. But years and years of playing other "successful" MMOs have conditioned players to believe otherwise. Consequently, we will likely be subjected to a grind of one kind or another for quite some time to come. I am faced with two choices myself: get used to it, or stop playing. Past experience (with other MMOs) suggests I am incapable of getting used to the sort of tedium an MMO "grind" involves, so...

I didn't mean to suggest that the 5th Column's exile represented a general "rule"; I was merely pointing out a particularly shameful move on the part of the publishers that left a very sour taste in my mouth. The fact that they were willing to do that completely undermined my confidence in them as developers.

I was gone from about I12 until I21, so I missed their reintroduction into the game. But for me, it is too little too late. They missed their chance to "undo" the damage they had done to my confidence in them when the 5C didn't return much sooner, taking the Council out completely in the process. Like I said, I'm glad they are back, but they seem relegated to a status even less relevant to ongoing events than Arachnos. Which is a shame because as much as I love Nemesis--both as a villain group and as an individual major mover-shaker in the greater mythos--I would have liked to see the 5th Column be more involved; for instance, replacing the Council in every single nook and cranny of content originally and currently filled by them. And that's just for starters.

But I realize that'll never happen. It is all about Praetoria (Emperor Cole), the Hamidon, and the Battalion now. Along with whatever tangential role Nemesis plays, being the nearly omniscient timelord that he is...

The Natural origin is also supposed to cover aliens (like Superman or Martian Manhunter) who aren't special by the definitions of their own species, but who are akin to demigods compared to humans. When these characters take on giant mecha and survive (and even win!) we shouldn't be too surprised since they are, well, akin to demigods on Earth. The fact that the "Natural" origin in CoX is overly (and uselessly) broad and covers characters who are merely highly trained humans should not blind us to the fact that not every character is a superhero just because they share origin space with those who truly are.

When you say, "Hey civilians should be able to fend off a Bone Daddy since my Natural origin, acrobatic, martial artist Robin clone can!" you aren't really demonstrating the inherent logic of an ordinary human's ability to take on a supernaturally empowered gang Boss, but rather demonstrating the inherent illogic of a highly trained human's ability to do so. And before you bother to point out that the comics allow this sort of thing to happen all the time, I would point out that such cases are handled by having the hero defeat the overpowering foe with clever tactical stunts that CoX does not permit, or by extricating the hero with poor writing. Neither of which help CoX justify the notion of ordinary (including highly trained) humans going toe-to-toe with giant mecha (or Bone Daddies) in contests of delivering/withstanding direct damage.

Or worse, "OMG they've expunged XYZ from the game entirely!"

The 5th Column was one of my favorite villain groups when I started playing back in 2004, and I and others I know had made character concepts that were tied to that villain group. When they were just yanked out wholesale and replaced with the Council, all our faith in Cryptic kind of went right out the window. I am pleased to see them "back", but it is in such an afterthought-ish way, almost as if Paragon would be happier if nobody even really noticed them, that the bad taste left from their original removal continues to dampen enthusiasm.

I also remember the Rularuu invasion zone event when it originally occurred. I was doing missions in Atlas Park when the Brutes and Overseers just started gating in and wreaking havoc. They quickly overwhelmed all the zones, mostly due to a need to scale it back a bit in the code, but that first night was absolutely glorious. It really didn't take long before all the work that went into that villain group turned into a huge tax writeoff, as they are never encountered outside of the Shadow Shard and those zones get about as much play as the PvP arenas. What a waste of resources.

I am sympathetic to the "limited resources" problem Paragon Studios faces (they don't have Blizzard-like money to play with), but it seems to me they have a history of expending resources in dubious directions that make me scratch my head and whistfully think, "If only..."

Even a debuff that removes all of a hero's added DEF and resistance, effectively making them equivalent to a normal human, shouldn't suddenly turn them into feeble infants incapable of fending off a few rocks. Especially given how fast our heroes are still hopping from building to building. As a matter of comparison, a statistic compiled years ago from Los Angeles police reports showed that 75% of all firefights between police and assailants, which are at ranges of less than 30 feet, missed their targets, and the vast majority of the other 25% were non-fatal. There is just no way to make the TPN Killer Protester make sense.

The narrative either needs to make them heavily-armed IDF forces, or the game system needs to dispense with the idea that a "level 54 civilian" is anything but absurd and logically and mechanically untenable. But, as I've said before, this is not just a failure of presentation, in my mind, but an indictment of the level system all together. On the one hand it could be explained that someone at Paragon had a synaptic misfire and let the idea of a level 54 civilian slip past all rational scrutiny, but I would argue that it is the presence of levels (in the classic/clunky D&D mold) at all that tempt (drive?) such ridiculous "design choices" in the first place.

I agree completely. But let's be honest, this is the same dubious writing model that has afflicted comics for decades. A new writer comes on board and retcons or runs roughshod over the lore established by previous writers, even lore beloved by fans (can anyone say "Death of Phoenix"? I knew you could).

I don't mean for this to sound like I am excusing what Paragon Studios has been permitting (demanding?) with the writing of new content since the departure of its earliest authors, rather, I am simply pointing out that it is entirely consistent with its source material. And despite my devotion to the idea of RPGs being faithful to their source material, this is one aspect of that source material I really wish CoX would stop emulating.

Tired of Praetoria

I was gone from the game from just prior to GR to just prior to Freedom, and upon my return after those 3+ years away I was very surprised to see how much Praetoria had risen to almost completely take over the role of Major Villain. It felt like Lord Recluse and Arachnos had lost its luster among the writers at Paragon Studios and so they were ultimately relegated to the status of Just Another Villain Group with minions/lieuts/bosses. I was a little taken aback by how Praetoria had been "fleshed out" in this morally ambiguous shades-of-gray manner that made it entirely unappealing to me (I like my heroes to wear white hats and my villains to wear black hats, so to speak, which is why I liked the old take on Praetorian Earth with its classic Silver Age Mirror, Mirror motif).

As far as I'm concerned, Praetoria is just a source of high-tech enemies with fancier graphics that has overstayed its welcome (with me) narratively, and I'm disappointed that it has become the focus of the Incarnate storyline so far. I'm disappointed that they also keep turning to the Hamidon as the Big Bad (honestly, I never found the "big pile of goo" to be a compelling master villain). I'm more interested in The Battalion, but I have a feeling I am going to lose interest in the game (again) before they are ever truly elaborated upon.

I agree that it is a formula that has made CoX (and almost all the other MMOs out there that rehash the same old tired mechanics and design tropes that Ultima Online established and Everquest perfected) "successful" in the market place. But while CoX is the best MMO I've played, I nevertheless think that MMOs reached a point of stagnation years ago, including CoX, and nobody has had the courage or the creativity to break out of the rut (Tabula Rasa had this as their original philosophical goal but caved in to the "we don't want anything new" pressures of the beta testing community and ended up with an MMORPG/FPS that had very little new to offer at all in terms of an MMO game experience).

Skip This If You Aren't A Game Design Nerd

The first thing that needs to happen in order to shake things up, is to throw away all the old assumptions like you listed above. Too many designers appear to be stuck in a mindset that says you have to have levels and you have to have loot and you have to have raiding and blah blah blah. Well my design whiteboard has a huge title above it that is my mantra: Question Everything. And that starts with the assumption that "character progression" is the only thing that will motivate players to play. Millions of player-hours on games like PacMan, Tetris, and Bejeweled say otherwise. Any game, even an RPG, can be designed such that the game play itself is the reason people are addicted to it, not gross power progression. This is not to say that character progression would be eliminated, only that it wouldn't be the carrot that is held out to keep players playing; that an entirely different emphasis would be in place, which would free up the game to focus on internally consistent narratives that don't have to worry about conceptual disconnects like "Your level 40 hero can shrug off a missile fired from a level 10 mecha, but not a crowbar from a level 60 thug."

You might say, well you need something to differentiate the power levels between entities in the game. Correct, but the moment you put conventional levels in a game, everyone expects them to work the way they always have. If I were to use levels merely as an illustrative tool, I would use the following example:

Level 0 or 1: Regular humans. Skilled/trained folks are level 1 (police, military, atheletes, etc.)
Level 2: Exceptionally skilled/trained folks (Navy SEALS, James Bond, world record holding atheletes).
Level 3: Fantastically skilled/trained folks, straddling the line between realistic and complete fantasy (Batman, Black Widow, Hawkeye, etc.)
Level 4-8: Superheroes. Level 4 is effectively where every starting character begins the game, though perhaps by taking extra "Weaknesses" they get to start level 5.
Level 10: Major supervillain (Magneto, Dr. Doom, Loki, etc.)
Level 15-20: World-threatening entity (Thanos, Darkseid, Kang the Conqueror, Galactus, etc.)
...and so on...

Two key things to note in the way the above scale is intended to work: (1) A single level difference would make a fight very difficult, while a two level difference is almost entirely one-sided and a forgone conclusion, and (2) A character's entire career would be spent in a 2-3 level window of "progression", with most of that progression happening at a micro-fine level of refinement that takes a very long time before equating to an actual level bump. In case you can't tell, the above level scale is essentially the 4th edition Champions point scale divided by 50.

As you can see, almost an entire game's worth of content could be built around the level 3 stratum simply due to the number of players that like that conceptual level. And while the level 3 Batman types might be able to sort of hold their own doing missions with level 4 superheroes (ala early X-Men) by employing super tech gadgets, they are probably better off staying in their level 2/3 content range so that the narrative logic always matches the mechanical outcomes without having to contrive explanations that don't fit their character concepts (and I would argue that a "regular human" who relies on supertech to be level 4 or 5 all the time is level 4 or 5, and he's called Iron Man, not Batman).

This level breakdown is only meant for demonstration purposes, and isn't literally the way I would implement a new CoX if I had the chance. But it gets across some important elements that would serve many of the issues people have with many of the conceptual disconnects we see currently.

You've just described what I see as the key difference between Champions and D&D, which is intriguing since Emmert always claimed a fondness for Champions. Yet that is not evident in any aspect of CoX, except perhaps in dumbed down form in the power enchancement system.

One of the game's flaws, as I see it, is its slavish devotion to the D&D concept of classes and levels, and its tradition of starting new characters at level 1. That's why we have the non-comic-book progression from thugs to cosmic entities in the player character experience. Had it been based on Champions, however, you would have had more or less the alternative that you describe: characters that are mostly at their peak potential right from the very beginning, but who get to refine their abilities in subtle ways over time, or alternatively, save up their "experience rewards" for a big change (ala "radiation accident") somewhere down the line.

In a game like that, the rewards for succeeding turn out not to be the shinies that contribute to "character progression," but the unlocking of new content and the promise of new opportunities to feel like a superhero some more. The game mechanics should be so much fun that exercising them is its own reward (and the main one). I know this concept is probably alien to most gamers, but it is precisely how Champions felt to me for the 10+ years I played it. I rarely spent my xp because I was too busy playing the next scenario to bother figuring out how to "improve" my character. Usually my xp was spent lowering endurance costs, or adding some small utility ability. Enhancing my character was really no big deal given how effective it was right from the start. What made the game addictive was the actual game play and how it made me feel like a superhero, not the inconsequential meta-rewards that resulted from it.

How does one do that anyway? By putting "IMO" somewhere in every single sentence? Oy veh.

For some reason I have no problem parsing Sam's posts as expressions of his personal opinion. If I can do that, anyone can (and I figured they did). If you feel Sam believes himself to be all-knowing and incapable of error, then you may be a wee bit oversensitive to strongly expressed viewpoints, and maybe the Internet is not for you.

Only in the present, limited conception/implementation of MMO mission content delivery. There are potential alternatives, but they would not fit into the existing CoX infrastructure, so talking about them (in detail) would be fruitless. But it needs to be said that there are possible ways of delivering virtually unlimited content which impacts the game world in a persistent way and is all part of a greater storyline in which everything that players do matters. The overall design structure for it covers my whiteboard...

There are going to be problems evangelizing any new method of forming teams that either:

• Differ in any way from "tried and true" methods long-time players are already familiar with and like.
• Remove any control over team composition.

The first problem is the hardest to overcome because even if you solve the second, habit will rule over all. The whole "<blah> forming. LFxM. pst if interested" broadcasting method will probably never go away. Ever.

I think there is a Quixotic hope that its not too late to convince the devs to change how iTrials are designed in the future since they are relatively "new" compared to all the other content in the game. Narratively, the trials are linear, but play-wise they are cyclic (because they were made repeatable). You can't have both without requiring the player to ignore everything his logical brain expects from a linear storyline. Cause and effect have to be thrown out the window entirely. Some players really hate being asked to do that, especially when it is due to dubious design compromises. The solution, ostensibly, is to get the devs to rethink those compromises and take a different approach in the work they do for upcoming releases. Either make the trials non-repeatable (unlikely given how it is necessary to farm the content in order to progress through the Incarnate slot trees), or change the "stories" of the new trials so that repeating them makes sense logically and narratively.