BurningChick

Damn.

Someone else mentioned Gravity, but the effect would've been hella' cool as a replacement for KB in Repulsion Field / Sonic Repulsion / Repel.

Damn.

FF defenders are among the most powerful mitigators of damage in, AFAIK, any of the major MMOs but have always been as rare as hens teeth.

That, more than anything else, speaks to how strong "armours" (and related debuffs) are in CoH.

Not that anyone ever reads my posts ...

But one other data point -- Posi hasn't posted his reply to our questions about the Story of CoH. If he spills the beans on everything ...

It wasn't Jack's call, it was Roper's and Roper did a public mea culpa right after the patch hit, but said it was necessary for the game and would be staying. Jack was the idea guy for CO, but other people implemented the systems and did the balance passes. The confusion comes from Jack's willingness to place himself in front of the crap that gets flung at his developers.

This is a VERY, VERY good thing for a boss to do. I've worked for bosses who routinely throw their workers under the bus. And it sucks.

That said, I think he has a tendency to speak off the cuff (or with an incomplete knowledge of the situation) which gets him into trouble, but WTH.

For anyone interested, here's the corroborating evidence:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/featur...a_.php?print=1
http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/08...winter-and-a/4

Some choice quotes from Jack (read into them what you will):

Coming into the launch of STO and Champions, I made sure we had something for everyone. Here was the problem. By following that philosophy, nothing was polished. We ended up having lots of half-done features in some quarters. What I forgot was, inasmuch as a consumer or a player, if it isn't there at launch it might as well not be there, well if it's in half-done or half-done well, that's what you get remembered for. The fact that STO and Champions have gotten better since their launch, we've added content, we've fixed bugs, we've responded to players, all that stuff isn't as important or as forceful as that initial interaction with the game. So we have a very different mindset here. Right now, whatever we do, it's got to be the best possible quality we can.

---

We don't use that internal terminology; it's just a short-hand way of describing it. To be honest, I've been in charge of development for all these games, it's really been my fault because I assumed that what we did with City of Heroes and City of Villains was a model we could keep repeating ad infinitum. With Champions and STO, we did the same everything, and the review scores were dramatically smaller. (laughs) Both Champions and STO are far better than City of Heroes was at launch, and it's a different market now, we have to adjust. I'm not going to be one of those developers who starts ******** about the reviewers or ******** about the customers. That's stupid. We've got to change and this is what we've got to do to change.

---

JE: Well it's not that I thought the quality wasn't up to par, it's the customers and critics and everybody else, right? [laughs] All you have to do is go to Metacritic.com. It's not like we went out and said, "We're gonna make a really shi... mediocre game, and put in a box," no. We all thought that Star Trek Online was going to be phenomenal. We all thought that Champions was going to be phenomenal.

Even in open beta, the reaction we got from [Champions] was better than anything we ever did with City of Heroes and City of Villains. We were sky high. So believe me when the reviews came out, we were shocked, just shocked. Because there was nothing that would lead us to believe leading into it, from the data we had in beta, like the number of people playing, the number of downloads, how often they played and all that kind of stuff. It had exceeded anything that we had done previously.

So the reviews meant we had to have a reality check. The old way of doing things is very simple. We made City of Heroes in about a year-and-a-half. We made City of Villains in nine months, and both of which were successful, both of which were highly-acclaimed and reviewed.

And we looked around at MMO companies, and they were struggling. They were spending tens of millions of dollars, and we spent, what, $8 million on City of Heroes and $6 million on City of Villains. Here, we had a game, it was successful, we pumped 'em out, we had the technology, we had the tools, we thought we could be doing it forever, because we were like, "Yeah, we'll just keep making them every 18 months! We can!"

I was going to say something snarky about how Cryptic seems to be using CO as a means to train new devs on Cryptic's engine before they get moved to STO or Neverwinter and leave it at that.

But I seem to recall that STO has (had?) the same system.

I think that, despite Cryptic's attempts to release nothing but fully realized, polished products, they sometimes slip into "git 'r' done" mode. And they clearly saw the need to have a system to ban spammers. And didn't have the bodies to manually review the flagged players' logs. And then ...

What's interesting is that, when MUO budded off CoH, the remaining CoH devs fixed i7, started cleaning up code, herded us into giving focused feedback during betas, and, in general, released their strongest string of updates, ever, from I8 through I12.

Paragon Studios rapidly changed its culture, but Cryptic wasn't able to ... at least for CO and STO.

Naaaah, not at all. I always thought of Mids (and Hero Builder) as another way of playing the game, like marketeering or PvP. And some elements of gameplay simply aren't for everyone. The interesting bit is that this particular element of gameplay was driven by the players -- and thank you for helping to support it!

Honestly, while levelling (note: I haven't levelled a toon 1-50 since time came out) I'd always wing it. Between earned respecs, freespecs, vetrewardspecs, and recipes, I always figured I could fix things on the fly. And it was for the respecs that I'd open up the enhancement screen, look over the powers, think about what I didn't like (bonuses, recharge times, cones or no cones, control v. damage) and fix things. With columns for primary / secondary / pool / epic, I'd open up the enhancement screen and write down the powers I'm keeping: every time I swapped one power out, I'd sub in a new one; every time I swapped a slot, I'd add it somewhere else. And then I'd just keep some of the basic rules in my head (travel power, or facsimile thereof early, for exemplaring, damage procs in otherwise low damage but spammable powers, RoF as soon as it opens, etc.).

In general, I don't think I ever had the uberest of the uber toons, but ... I do think Burning Up, my fire / fire dom, was a thing of beauty.

Hmmm ... that reminds. I think I /did/ use Mids to extract Burning Up's build from live. And then I posted it. So ... twice

That was incredibly slick. Say thanks to the mids devs for me

I used Mids once for a build ...

But, honestly, I found the process so tedious I ended using paper and pen to figure out what powers I wanted and how many slots to burn on each power. Once I got the hang of the invention system, I had a pretty solid feel for the bonuses I wanted and how to get them.

One last confession -- when the last round of buffs to EA hit closed beta (I was early in i9, later in each of the following issues, and hadn't yet been invite to this particular issue), there was a bug that let in /everyone/ near the end of the process for a short period. I logged in, saw the changes, and spilled the beans on the forum.

I was never let in to another closed beta again, despite the fact that no one (well, almost no one) reads my posts. I generated, IIRC, no replies despite the threads containing nothing but speculation growing.

One time, we had an impromptu SG meeting in Warburg by one of the nodes. I turned on Force Bubble to keep some fire tanker away from the meeting and essentially glued him into a corner. Since he didn't have a ranged attack ...

Edit: right after Warburg was released, I plowed through one of the few massed PvP battles, ever, on Pinnacle with Force Bubble. I also interrupted 1v1 battles with detention field, firing it on the losing player to give him a chance to heal / regen.

I was very bad with BurningChick in the zombie PvP map.

I'd deliberately get defeated so I that I could come back as a zombie and light up my former teammates. There was a combination of fire AoEs / advantages that would cascade together into The Fiery Apocalypse at little or no energy cost with people locked in the "get the flames off me!" animation. With regen, the healing robots, and a self heal, it could get silly.

I only did it 2 or 3 times, but I think I caused a flurry of inflammatory, so to speak, posts on the forum.

I think you have to remember that CO grew out of the devs' experiences with CoH through Issue 6 when (de)buff stacking and controls could turn any encounter, save Hami, into a snooze.

Even today, CoH's devs have been dealing with the same issues -- just look at how the Incarnate Trials have been structured with mobs that are, more or less, immune to controls along with the insta-gibs, jacked up ToHit values, and confuses. One of my pet peeves is that the structure of CoH's epic content is designed explicitly to negate Force Fields.

The CO devs made a trade-off -- having weaker / non-stacking (de)buffs (and controls) that always do something compared to CoH's situation where you have insanely good or completely ineffective (de)buffs and controls.

There's the bit where you call me, or at least my statement (which, of course, is a reflection of me), "delusional".

I would lay the blame on your system's poor performance more on how you've tweaked your settings for CoH and how you haven't done the same for CO.

From your other post, the one in which you called me "delusional", I'm guessing you spent most of your time alone in-game?

WoW can almost be played on a C64.

If a game has less than realistic (edit: contemporary?) graphics, it's often for performance reasons (edit: or to maintain compatibility with the game's original specs).

FWIW, I've never seen lag in CO (even its zones load fast) -- but I've seen CoH turn into a slideshow on machines that go way beyond recommended specs.

Just to slip something into your argument ...

It's important to remember that NCSoft shut down not just CoH, but the entire studio.

We know that Paragon was actively working on another title; that Paragon has been hiring people for said title for at least a couple years; that, as far as we can tell, the new project had more bodies than CoH. Paragon, as a studio, was possibly losing money. That's OK if The Sekrit looked to be a hit ... but in the wake of SWTOR tanking, WoW losing players, and revenues down across NCSoft's core games, the market doesn't look particularly good for MMOs.

A twist: when Paragon pitched the new project to NCSoft, Paragon said, "Self-financed with CoH's revenue. Look at what we have lined up -- we should be able maintain our revenue, and possibly grow." It's possible that Paragon bit off more than it could chew at a VERY bad time for the industry (financial crisis, economic downturn, the shine coming off MMOs, whatever).

I suspect we're looking for bogeymen outside Paragon (Cryptic, NCSoft), while the fault could, conceivably, lie with Paragon's management (not the devs, mind you, but with management).