Arcanaville

Every MMO has the contact system. This guy hands you errands to perform and then rewards you. As has been pointed out numerous times, you have to almost universally suspend belief in any MMO that its remotely logical these people are asking you to do what they are asking you to do.

It would be interesting if contacts were stood on their head: make an enemy of the Tsoo, and a Tsoo boss starts gunning for you. A simple mission turns into a trap sprung by the Tsoo. They start interfering with your ability to do other things, and you start actively hearing from NPC X that the Tsoo are looking for you in location Y. Instead of contacts giving you things to do, you ask them for information on finding Tsoo Boss Z. They start giving you missions you ask for, which are designed to lead you to the source of your problems.

Contacts would have specific information and missions they were aware of, but instead of always just handing them out in a particular order they would given them to the player upon request instead. This could even be part of a dynamic system of mission generation where a Mad Libs-like generator was capable of generating sort of a "plot state machine" where the character has an enemy X and to defeat him requires a randomly selected set of conditions be met: defeat his Lts, find his lair, foil some of his plots, etc. Doing the required missions to achieve each objective would eventually put the player into the right state to trigger the end of the line mission.

Contacts wouldn't only hand out missions, they could react to the proactive needs of the player. The "reward" for unlocking and staying on reasonable terms with a contact would be that they would be useful to help the player resolve their own driven objectives.

Heck, even experts will get into fist-fights over the efficacy of RAID 6.

Here's my take on Origins. They are a mess. They don't map to anything significant in terms of gameplay, they don't map to anything comprehensible in terms of story, and yet they are not 100% free choices. That's about as bad a set of design decisions you can make.

If I was making a superhero game, I would make "origin" map to something distinct regarding the *powers* the player could have, and that origin would have an actual gameplay impact.

From my point of view, there are three different kinds of "rules" that superabilities seem to follow in most fiction. And those are (super)science including high technology, magic, and whatever you call astral/psionic/mental type powers. Either your power(s) obey the laws of physics - or at least pretend to follow the fictional world's version of physics - or they follow some sort of alternate rules of magic or they seem to follow a completely different set of rules that involve the astral plane, psionic abilities, dream worlds, and other hyper-constructs of the mind and consciousness.

In City of Heroes magical fire and psionic fire and technological fire are all fire. Fire attacks and Fire damage are "elemental" to the game: how you achieve Fire is irrelevant to what Fire does. But I don't think that emulates very well how the rules of comic book fiction work. Some things are highly resistant to magic. You can punch them in the face, but conjuring a fist to punch them in the face is far less effective. Sometimes magical shields can be almost impenetrable to magical bolts of energy and yet bullets pass right through them. And sometimes all the magic and technology in the world doesn't stop something from killing you in your dreams. It would be incredibly difficult to incorporate all the myriad ways in which magic and non-magic interact, but incorporating a bit of the flavor of the fact these two things are reluctant neighbors in the fictional world would add gameplay spice. It adds a way to solve the Superman problem of being completely invulnerable to damage, but still vulnerable - in the comic books, one thing he is vulnerable to is magic.

These properties would be attached to *powers* not *characters* so players could still choose what their "origin" was freely, but they would still have to make choices about what kinds of abilities to pursue within the game.

For me, its about meaningful choices. Meaningful choices have to straddle the line between allowing players the maximum amount of freedom to choose how their characters evolve while still making those choices have unavoidable consequences which the players have to deal with. At some point, some freedom has to be sacrificed to make some decisions lead to very specific results. Players should be able to choose what they can do, but not necessarily how the rest of the world chooses to react to what they do. And how the powers work, the "physics" of the game in a manner of speaking, is something the game developers themselves have to keep strong control of if the gameplay choices are to be meaningful ones within the game itself.

The best part is when you cannot say you cannot speak about a topic you cannot speak, because the fact you cannot speak is itself confidential.

Your incredulity is improperly calibrated.

If you still have the drive, I can probably rebuild that.

Going farther, wouldn't it be interesting if there were no declared factions at all? Everyone's just a superpowered someone, and whether they are a "hero" or "villain" is completely irrelevant: they can choose to help or hurt any contact or faction in the game, and the game responds accordingly. You could (or at least attempt to) be an ally to the Hellions, but then crackdown on the Tsoo. You could foil Arachnos, but secretly work for Nemesis. What if every NPC reacted to you based on their own judgment of whether *they* think you are on their side or not?

You don't have to worry anymore about players saying "a real villain wouldn't do that." They would be "free" to do whatever they think they would do, but they would also have to live with the consequences of those decisions. Maybe they think a real hero would kill Antimatter given the chance. But maybe the citizens of Praetoria would disagree. Maybe a real villain wouldn't help stop a Rikti invasion. But maybe Arachnos decides to kick them to the curb for appearing to be a coward.

Instead of being about heroes and villains, it would be about lone wolfs and social butterflies, stalwarts and boot-lickers. It would be about how the player decides to deal with all the competing interests in the world, and to what degree they want to build relationships or ignore them, and with who.


Maybe, but it was a stupid objection even before co-op zones. Unless you are making an unrestricted open PvP game, you don't need the psychopathic wing of the MMO player association.

I wish I could have helped you there. If I knew then, or if by some miracle you still have the drive and haven't reused it, I could probably get the data back for you.

Especially now that we know what happens when they land on their heads instead.

One thing I've constantly stated is that I think the players in general don't really understand the whole concept of risk/reward, because the "reward" in "risk/reward" is really a reward rate, not a reward, and that's a fundamentally different notion. But I've also stated that I don't think even the devs fully appreciate the notion: Positron has mentioned it and I know some of the devs get it, but the game as a whole is not designed fully cognizant of balancing rates and not rewards. That's why Giant Monsters have huge rewards, but trivial reward rates.

A mission should be thought of in terms of a timeline, I think. Within that timeline, players can do certain things and earn certain rewards. The way to balance things like tanks herding maps and stalkers stealthing maps is really just a question of looking at the time spent performing both activities and balancing reward rates. Stealthing a map involves performing a lot of motion with no reward, then earning a reward at the end. Plowing involves moving at a much slower pace, but earning rewards along the way. If we scale objective rewards based in part on how long it takes to reach them, we can take a rough cut at making plowing and stealthing have comparable reward earning rates.

This ignores the separate issue of balancing AoEs in combat which can swamp almost all other attempts to balance anything. I've always felt that one way to tame AoEs is with friendly fire. And you don't always have to have absolute failure modes or defeatable civilians with friendly fire. It could be something as simple as adding destructible environment and rewarding players for performing the minimum amount of property damage while defeating all the enemies in a building. Even villains can be given the choice between burning it down or looting it, even if they don't otherwise care about preserving it.


Oh, and since the topic is the perfect superhero game, I'll just say that while I understand the economy of scale, the perfect villain game is not the superhero game reskinned, or even replotted. It ought to fundamentally readdress anew questions like "what do we reward?" and "how are objectives completed?"

Back when CoV was in beta, I mentioned my belief that, however the logistics of the games were going to be managed, I would not have made a Rogue Isles. I would have dropped the villains right into Paragon. It would have allowed for the possibility of indirect faction competition. In other words, CoV players could have been the ones setting fires to buildings in Steel that CoH players could try to extinguish. CoV players could have been the ones setting bombs that CoH players could have tried to prevent. They could have been the ones opening portals to dark dimensions in the middle of Peregrine Island rather than anonymous relative non-entities (at the time) like Antimatter. There were lots of potential opportunities for faction-based mini-games that could have expanded the grey area between PvE and PvP, rather than make direct PvP be an isolated marginalized activity.

I think the idea of having the player community help build the world is a good idea, and pitting players against other players is a good way to reduce the grind. But direct confrontational PvP is not the only way to do that.

That's extremely difficult to do to an arbitrary standard. In fact I would say its impossible to do without targeting a specific person's definition of "viable."

I don't think there is a "perfect" superhero MMO (or any MMO) even in theory, because there are things different people like that are mutually exclusive. By definition, its impossible to include all the features everyone wants, and avoid every feature everyone wants to avoid.

But I think one thing that I've come to believe is very important for every MMO, and perhaps singularly critical for a superhero genre MMO, is you have to decide very early in the design process what will be structured in the game and what will be free and make them as orthogonal as possible. Meaning: if you want your players to have as much freedom as possible in area X, none of the structured elements of the game should have strong dependencies on X.

Very specifically, if you want to make a superhero genre MMO and one of the things you want to encapsulate is the very wide range of powers and abilities that are represented in the superhero genre, the conventional notions of "balance" for MMOs aren't going to work, because they tend to be structured around combat performance. Its impossible on its face to design a game around a wide range of acceptable performance and yet balance the game around that performance.

If a superhero genre MMO has to allow for a wide range of builds and abilities, it cannot critically depend on them for things like leveling. If the strong level proportionately faster than the weak, quantitative combat performance is not something you can allow huge ranges of. The solution is simply to decouple pure combat performance from leveling. Design the game around earning rewards for skill-based accomplishments that are not explicitly tied purely to combat performance. That can be by adding out of combat leveling options that are comparable to combat rewards, or devaluing combat defeats over completing task objectives, or some form of reward scaling by combat performance.

Getting back to what I said above, this isn't a "perfect" design rule. It immediately turns off players who believe that optimizing combat performance is their primary source of enjoyment and that such effort should be primarily rewarded. The players who believe its pointless to do things that don't offer optimal rewards, and can't achieve those rewards through pure min/maxing, will probably not like such a game.

But such people have lots of other games to play.

If you could alter the entity properties of entities spawned in a demorecord, you could inject movement and animations into them.

Which is another way of saying you could theoretically create a game engine and inject the visual behavior into the game client while it looped around playing a demorecord.

I had a couple of tanker ideas I was keeping completely to myself until Blasters got their sea legs post I24, as I promised I would focus on them until they were not just tweaked, but put back onto the road to being continuously managed.

One of the ideas I was sitting on was giving Tankers a passive-replenished absorb bar that would scale with level, and as it was depleted tankers would get a +dmg buff, sort of like Defiance 1.0 but not keyed to health. This would be automatic and unmanaged.

And then on top of that they'd get a click that would, when activated, increase their single target damage by burning absorb and adding a damage proc to their attacks that scaled between single target and AoEs. Using this would create the double-buff of having damage procs and getting the damage buff from the absorb shield getting burned down - in effect allowing the tanker to deliberately reduce survivability by burning their own shield but getting more damage in the process.

I think I could have sold some variation of that to Arbiter Hawk with the right numbers, and I think it could have made Tankers competitive with Brutes without overshadowing them or making their higher survivability broken.

I don't believe I posted a streakbreaker test within that context. The streakbreaker doesn't really work as expected with tanker single target attacks because they are not really single target attacks and, as Black Scorpion states, roll tohit rolls against multiple targets.

Something many players don't necessarily fully appreciate is that the gauntlet effect in tanker attacks is not autohit: it has to actually make a successful tohit roll against the target, albeit with a 20% bonus to the tohit roll. Those rolls count because, to be frank, there's no specific reason for them not to count. It may be an undesirable behavior, but to change it would require an explicit exemption somehow coded into the streakbreaker; this is not a case of the streakbreaker "not working."

A good journalist doesn't need to be opinionless, but they should distinguish at all times the difference between fact and opinion with no grey area between the two.

Hypothetically speaking, of course. I'm not certain I'm describing something that actually currently exists.

True story: I mentioned to Castle an idea for an epic archetype designed around a more complex variation of the custom critter valuation system and a pseudo-open power selection system and because this was near when he was leaving, he said "sounds good, go bother Tim about it."

Off and on, I've toyed with the idea, but there were critical problems with the math in certain areas, like AoE ally buffs, which are a lot easier to solve with custom critters. I would look at it, think about it, and then put it back on the shelf.

I believe I solved those problems at the beginning of the year. As soon as Blaster fixes were launched in I24, I was planning on hitting you with an email describing "a point-based open power-tree epic archetype."

I wish we could have kicked that around.

The "wild conjecture" is Garriott's not mine.

Items 22 and 23 of the original complaint:

All I can say is that based on what I've heard from multiple overlapping sources, the people who believe no credible efforts were made to save the game are multiply incorrect.

Are you saying your position is that the problem with server emulators is that there will be too many of them?

If only that were the problem.

I can't find the original judgment, but I can find the order for entering the judgment: http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal...pdf?1283432145

As to the letter itself, some of the context of that letter is probably in the trial transcripts only, but the order for entry of judgment does make what I believe to be a tangential reference to it:

I suspect that Garriott's position regarding the open letter at trial was that it was a press release designed to present the departure in its most amicable light, but that he disagreed with its content and only signed off on it because he felt it was only marketing fluff. Its obvious Garriott's position on the letter was that it was not an accurate representation of his position, and while he may have initially signed off on it, he clearly asked for its content to be clarified and not repeated as to his voluntary departure:

(from the original complaint).

The case documents make clear that while Garriott may have initially signed off on the press release, his refusal to sign a voluntary resignation letter and his assertions that he repeatedly over time requested that NCSoft not characterize his departure as "voluntary" make it clear that letter did not represent his intent. The fact that NCsoft apparently used it to attempt to show intent when they had overwhelming evidence it did not represent his intent makes it at least a component of an attempt to defraud. Whether its a forgery in the legal sense of the word is a technical issue. It was clearly a) not written by Garriott, b) characterized as being written by Garriott, c) misrepresents his intentions, and d) misrepresents them in a manner that has been legally determined to be fraudulent.

Its probably not a legal forgery, but only in the same sense racing across the street on your hands may not legally be jaywalking.

Adding these two statements together, the current City of Heroes is a game only vaguely like the original City of Heroes. If the current City of Heroes is a legitimate continuous extension of the original game, an emulated successor does not need to replicate the current game any more precisely than the game itself originally did as it was developed.

But that's mostly a tangent. The question was whether a game built upon an emulator could have a successful market implementation. That success rests primarily upon participation not implementation. I did not say that an emulated game wouldn't have a market implementation; that's a weird thing to claim one way or the other. I was responding to the assertion that without a viable market the logical conclusion is that the entire invention system becomes untenable. That's obviously false on its face, because the use of the markets is not mandatory to make the rest of the invention system function.

In no way does stating that "write off an entire section of the game and the community."

I don't think casual players are more fickle than power gamers, they are just fickle about different things. I see PvP-focused gamers moving from game to game all the time. I think the problem is that all gamers need a certain amount of novelty to hold their interest, and that novelty has to be focused in the areas those gamers both want and need, which are not the same things.

I don't think City of Heroes had the infrastructure necessary to generate enough of the kinds of novelty casual players needed, although they were improving in that area. New character customization options, new powersets, those are the kinds of things that could, if done fast enough and for a sufficiently long sustained period attract players over time. But that would have had the most impact between launch and two years after launch.

In either event, I don't think the lesson of Eve Online is that harder is better. I think that there's a much more important lesson to Eve Online, and that is that a game's culture is just as important as its mechanics. Eve Online's mechanics mesh extremely well with its gameplay, with includes a significant emphasis on the social structures the game encourages but doesn't explicitly mandate. The players created the environment in Eve, and that strong social dynamic gives Eve Online a lot of power to sustain its playerbase. I believe City of Heroes was so good in this area it could overcome severe deficits in other areas that would have, and probably should have killed it long ago, but it never went far enough in leveraging the tools it had to strengthen the in-game player communities. We did not see the potential for bases as community centers. We did not properly see the Architect as a social structure as opposed to just an authoring tool. Eve's gameplay is designed to get people involved in larger social structures, and while that turns some players off it provides a strong environment for those it does not. That has nothing to do with being easy or hard.

I think City of Heroes has the superior social tools: the teaming tools, the chat tools, the grouping tools. But I don't think it spent enough time leveraging them to improve the social environment within the game. We had the widest set of tools, but not the deepest in that regard. If I ever found myself working with the developers of an MMO again, that would be my focus. Difficulty is a significant, but not critical design issue. Social structure support is.