Arcanaville

I'm not sure there's a single thing that radically changed the game for me, although the invention system did cause me to radically rethink how I think about builds.

I can say that City of Heroes in general has in many ways spoiled me for all MMOs that come afterward. I've played something like fifteen to twenty MMOs since CoH launched, and while some were good and some were bad, there are certain things about City of Heroes that colors my view of them in a way very difficult to objectively circumvent. For example:

1. Travel powers and basic movement. Seriously, just about every first-person MMO I've played has a system of movement where a rock is an impenetrable barrier. War Walls may be an annoying game fiction, but in City of Heroes I can go from anywhere to anywhere else that is accessible at all by simply moving there. I leap over fences. I just plain fly over buildings. I jump from the bottom to the top of cliffs. And it is always jarring when I switch to most other MMOs and I can *see* it, but can't actually *move to it*.

Not to mention: spending most of your time jogging slower than you can in real life. It sometimes borders on the pathetic unless the scenery is really, really *really* good.


2. Global cooldown. Here, we throw hissy fits over weapon redraw and being rooted, but in most MMOs attacks have global cooldown timers. That means when you use power X, *all* (or most) powers become unavailable for a certain amount of time afterward. This allows the designers to enforce a specific dps rating for each attack, and related strengths for other powers. Having powers available, but having to stand around doing *nothing* because you're waiting for a global cooldown timer to expire is so opposite of the free-wheeling anything goes fast paced power activation system in City of Heroes that it can be down-right grating to play any other combat system. And keep in mind this comes from someone who can explain chapter and verse on *why* global cooldowns are there and why they are considered good game balancing tools.


3. Power diversity. Recently I've started playing another MMO. I can't mention which MMO I'm swinging light sabers in due to the forum rules, but suffice to say its a recently launched MMO. And while I beta tested this MMO, its still relatively new to me. And not one day into playing this MMO I found myself on a team of similar class characters. And I found that *almost every spawn* we were all doing exactly the same things, over and over again. Seriously: players of this MMO will know what I mean when I say leap, sweep, attack. It can get pretty blatant, because in this particular MMO which is actually a pretty entertaining one overall, everyone from the same class has basically the exact same powers. There are skill trees that can distinguish players, but they are more like invention slotting than radical power differences.

We have some homogeneity in City of Heroes, and you do find people with similar builds, but we don't just have fourteen archetypes, we have hundreds of different powerset combinations, and even a team full of energy blasters rarely fights in exactly the same way We always want more diversity, and its something we should always strive for, but the amount we already have is simply staggering when compared to other games.


4. Costumes and appearance customization. There's just no question we have one of the best, if not the best character customizer. We have years of built up options, and we also have a philosophy of non-functional appearance: our gear doesn't change what we look like for the most part. This means we have both a wide range of possible appearances and the freedom to pick whichever one we want without affecting our abilities. In this other MMO I won't name, I actually bought a hat which would increase my armor rating, which would therefore increase my defensive ability somewhat. I bought it, equipped it, and then almost fell out of my chair when I saw it on my character. It looked like an origami sculpture was attacking my head, and winning. I thought about it for a while, then unequipped it. I would basically rather be dead than wear that thing.

Because I'm spoiled, and this game spoiled me. I can fight in a suit of armor, in a bikini, in a suit and tie, in leather straps. If the hat's ugly, I don't wear the hat.


5. Chat. Ours is good. Everyone else's sucks. Period the end.

Ok, that other MMO I can't name? If you forget the comands to chat they have a selector, just like we do. You can basically do the equivalent of talking local, sending tells, talking on the main global channels. Guess what's not there, and I only found this out the first time I needed to do it and it wasn't there. Talk to your team mates.

Guess it must have slipped their minds.


I'm not knocking any other MMO, in particular this other MMO I mention is actually entertaining and they do a lot of things right. Conversely, we do a lot of things wrong, some of them spectacularly so. But its nevertheless true that what we do right we do really right, and so much so its actually jarring to see those things done so wrong in more modern MMOs.

I have been increasingly concerned about a specific issue with some of the recent trial badges. Its one thing to ask a single player to perform some degenerate behavior to get a badge, whether its killing thousands of monkeys for no reason or whatever. If you really want the badge, you'll complain about it but you'll do it. Its another thing to make badges that require teams, like completing Positron's task force.

Combining the two is problematic because you have to ask an entire team to do something unrelated to the primary task. Even the old school Master badges asked teams to at least do something that didn't interfere with running the task force: don't die. You can ask someone to not die, please.

But Master of Keyes? That requires volunteer bunnies to hop around avoiding patches, an activity that isn't strictly necessary to complete the trial. And it requires a league to deliberately shoot at the thing you're not supposed to shoot at for the sole purpose of taking more damage for no reason. Master of Underground requires asking an entire league to give up an additional half hour of their lives creeping through tunnels and shooting at bombs instead of just setting them off and getting to the end of the trial.

When badging was something you could either do solo or do with a team where the badge requirements were nominally parallel with doing well at the team task in general, badging was at worst an extra activity that wasn't antagonistic to the rest of the game. But badges like Preservation Specialist put badgers in actual conflict with other players: others have to suffer for you to get that badge, and unnecessarily if they are not badgers. Master of Lambda has similar silly requirements that require asking an entire league to do something stupid just so the badgers can get the badge.

I think that's a problem. The devs need to institute a cardinal rule on badges: badges that require teams will not require degenerate behavior from the league. Badges that can be acquired solo can ask the players to do anything the devs wants, but badges that require teams should never require badges to force non-badgers to do blatantly unproductive things.

WHY MOVIES SUCK TODAY

Based on the OP, its probably because everyone on Earth wants sucky movies. The list of movies railed on runs the complete gamut from excellent movies (Saving Private Ryan) to reasonable genre movies (Star Trek), to the clearly scrambled (X-Men Origins: Wolverine). Its a shotgun blast of everything everyone likes and hates.

Personally, I liked Star Trek and I think Abrams did a good job navigating the pitfalls of making a movie that would appeal to new viewers while appealing to as many of the older fans as possible. But I can understand why some people don't like it. However, someone who simultaneously lists Star Trek along with Saving Private Ryan as examples of what's wrong with Hollywood is, I believe, equating their own personal preferences with objective quality.

Basically, movies suck today because your personal preferences aren't being targeted, because they are extremely narrow. That there was ever a time they were was purely coincidental.