CannonballJack

I know you're just doing the serious-but-not thing here, but...was it karma when City of Heroes was given its cancellation notice? Or is it only karma when we want it to be?

It's a little frustrating that this has to be pointed out at all, much less over and over and over. I understand why people want that feeling that we're "beating" NCSoft somehow, but it's just not so, and players harping on it has been a constant source of irritation for me for the past two and a half months.

Right after the announcement that there would be refunds for subscriptions and last-month purchases, people on in-game channels started harping about how this was because the whole SaveCoH movement pressured NCSoft into the choice. What? No, it was a common-sense move that they were almost guaranteed to make anyway, and probably would have announced at the same time as the shutdown if they'd been doing their jobs. Of course they're not going to keep payments given for services they never provide; EULA or no EULA, that's a lawsuit, and more worryingly, a lot of temporary blocks from banks and credit card companies. They're not going to make it impossible for players to buy GW2 just so that they can keep some sub fees. It had nothing to do with angry CoH players. Still, the cry went up: "We're beating NCSoft!"

Then NCSoft made the "exhausted all options" announcement, and, somehow, that was still a victory for us. They weren't going to say anything, but we pressured them into a statement! Well, it's a statement that we won't ever get what we want, delivered in smarmy corporate-speak that more or less declares "and we think you're idiots," but sure, we got a statement out of them. We just didn't get anything we wanted. Still, the cry went up: "We're beating NCSoft!"

Now we have the stock slump. Never mind that CoH was maybe 1% of NCSoft's revenue, and that about 95% of it is in Asia. Somehow, this stubby little tail is wagging the dog because we want to believe it is. It's maddening enough that people believe that we can destroy NCSoft (with what, voodoo and wishful thinking?) and that we should destroy NCSoft (because losing 80 jobs is a tragedy, but hundreds or even thousands would be justice). The belief that we are destroying NCSoft requires ignoring all evidence and common sense. Still, the cry went up: "We're beating NCSoft!"

But we're not. We're just not. This isn't even a fight. We're angry ex-customers who are angry because we're ex-customers, but they'd already done the math and decided that losing our business was a worthwhile trade for...whatever they accomplished. (Seriously, what the hell was it?) NCSoft has made a weird, possibly pointless mistake, but they won't really suffer for it. Believing that they will just makes us childish, and accomplishes nothing.

I'll look it up just as soon as I'm done watching this Real Housewives of Cap au Diable marathon.

I think it only happens with things I love, so I'll be playing Champions Online instead. However, I will be watching your favorite TV shows. Try not to get attached!

Even knowing the many reasons we could never have received a statement like this for CoH, the contrast is still striking to me. It's especially remarkable when you consider that TinySpeck (Glitch's developers) will no longer be in a position to take customers. They gain nothing from doing this right - but they did it anyway. I think City of Heroes, and Paragon, deserved something closer to this.

Good point on the three dead months. I'm not convinced by the forecast-of-doom idea, though. I know us MMOers are the most panicky of sheep, but how many subscribers could NCSoft really expect to lose between "Paragon laid off half its staff" and "but none of them were working on CoH?" That could be literally the same announcement!

Everybody who's ever worked at a big company knows that their boss is an overpaid halfwit who's never even opened that copy of The Art of War.

I've been wondering if maybe this was NCSoft's rationale.

From all of the numbers and arguments I've seen tossed around, it seems like City of Heroes was profitable, but not very, and was gradually shrinking. It doesn't seem likely that it was actually losing money, or even that it was just one bad month away from it, but it's pretty clear (mostly from all of the research Father Xmas has done) that it wasn't growing, either. Still, if it was providing a reliable profit, what kind of reasonable businessperson would shut it down, especially with the dead loss of three months of uncompensated maintenance costs tacked on? That's just throwing money away.

Paragon wasn't growing, though. If NCSoft lacked confidence in the Secret Project, then cutting it would leave Paragon as a branch of the business that would, at best, turn in a gradually-diminishing profit year after year: Profit without growth. To a certain kind of business philosophy, that's a liability rather than a flawed asset.

So could that be the reason NCSoft pulled the plug on Paragon? It seems goofy, but I can picture some of the MBA-types I've known arguing for it.

Go to http://www.twitch.tv/paragonstudios/videos. That'll get you a list of all of the videos - I'm watching the latest now, so it apparently works. Don't be alarmed that it basically starts mid-sentence.

Yeah, you'd really have to try to come up with a more comprehensively silly system than IOs. I still don't know exactly how static bonuses like the +3% def from Steadfast Protection work with exemplaring, and that's after years of messing around with Mids.

The problem with CO's specializations isn't the system. At a glance, it doesn't look too complicated. You get a bunch of apparent choices, half of them are trash, so you take the ones that aren't. MMO 101. The problem is that the best way to find out which options are trash is to get the advice of know-it-all players (another MMO universal), but the CO forums seem to be less populated or less stable or something. I found some pretty comprehensive guides to the freeloader Archetypes on a different set of forums, but forgot to bookmark them. Whoops.

Anyway, the truth is out there. Somewhere.

How about...bugs? Game-breaking bugs are objectively bad, right? For example, one of the missions in the Vibora Bay Crisis was bugged for a while (I don't know how long, but weeks at a minimum), with the result that you couldn't finish the mission, or the Crisis, and therefore couldn't get access to a chunk of CO's content. Imagine if you flat-out couldn't visit Night Ward because the Shadowed Paths power that sent you there wouldn't work. That, in my humble opinion, would be universally and objectively bad.

From what I understand, the CO crew fixed this in the latest patch, so I don't want to pile on, but it's one of those worrying signs that makes me reluctant to sub to CO (which I know is optional). I also understand that two of the three adventure packs have gamestopping bugs. CO doesn't have a lot of content, and it sounds like some portion of it flat-out doesn't work at any given time. Again: Bad.

But I get what BellaStrega is saying. There's a difference between "I don't like this because it's not what I'm looking for" and "I don't like this because it's badly designed." Complaining about the blocking mechanic is the former (I like it, but can understand why people don't). Complaining about the boss fight at the end of the tutorial is the latter (unless the point of the tutorial is to show you how the death penalty works, in which case, it's a secret success).

Or for another example that doubles as a pointlessly-spiteful potshot at a game I'll probably wind up playing in December: I don't like that they have a goofy writing style, but that's a matter of taste. You can fit a goofy character into a serious world (plenty of my CoH characters have been jokes), but a serious character just looks stupid in a goofy world. That's a pure matter of taste, though, and I've seen CO players say that they like the campy writing style. It's Silver Age! It has a sense of humor! Whatever floats your boat.

On the other hand, I also think that the humor is badly-written. It's not funny! It's just childish and feeble. I feel like there's a writer shouting "Get it? GET IT?" at me, and I want to squeegee the flopsweat off my screen. Example: In one mission, you rescue the characters from Anchorman. The joke is that they're the characters from Anchorman. That's as much work as they put in - look, it's a reference! It's like Scary Movie. Of course, people must like the Scary Movie series since there are now thirty of them, so it's still subjective, but at least you can make the case that it's objectively lazy and shallow. After all, if you'd never heard of Anchorman, would the NPCs make sense at all, much less be funny?

That, I think, is the difference between "this is bad" and "I do not like this." Champions Online tries to be campy: I do not like this. They put in the absolute minimum amount of effort in doing so: This is bad.

For what it's worth, I did laugh at the Ghostbusters references in Night Ward, so I'm not opposed to humor-by-reference. I think the difference is that those reveals would both have worked just fine if you'd never seen Ghostbusters.

But you won't get the badge until the tenth time.

So "this is why we can't have nice things," then?

I know this is dogpiling, but CO was only a few months old and had an apparent content shortage. I was on the fence about buying the game, so I checked the forums occasionally and saw a lot of complaints about there being neither enough missions to reach 40 nor enough things to do at 40. I saw enough of this that I'd think, "Ehh, wait another month."

It's a matter of good faith. MMOs launch buggy and incomplete, but they justify that subscription fee by improving and expanding over time. Vibora Bay was going to be their first large content expansion since launch and their chance to prove that the game hadn't been a scam. When Cryptic proposed charging for it, they effectively announced that the good faith was just a consumer delusion, and that the buggy, incomplete game the customers had purchased was all they were getting. I breathed a sigh of relief - bullet dodged! - but I can only imagine how furious the lifetime sub people must have felt. Nobody wants to be a sucker.

Companies don't reverse decisions because forum posters are angry. Forum posters are always angry. They reverse decisions because they think the alternative will be to lose money. Trying to charge for Vibora Bay was a jaw-droppingly, face-palmingly, head-deskingly stupid bit of mismanagement which would have cost Cryptic subscribers if they hadn't backed down. If they had tried something like that after demonstrating that they were committed to adding new content as part of the general service level to subscribers, it almost certainly would have gone over better.

So sending you on a 40-level odyssey of discovery is probably not the best idea, then.

Okay, here's some stuff you can do much faster. They added four mid-level arcs with Issue 22 that are, in my opinion, the high mark for mission design in the game:

Laura Lockhart: (Steel Canyon) Help a UN soldier defuse the escalating Council-5th Column street war.

Graham Easton: (Steel Canyon) Work with a museum curator to discover how not to make friends with the Tsoo.

Bane Spider Ruben: (Cap au Diable) Investigate possible mind-control of your fellow Destined Ones...and find a way to turn it to your advantage!

Brother Hammond: (Cap au Diable) Manipulate some gullible Luddites into helping you with a heist. What could go wrong? (My personal favorite arc in CoX, period.)

They're in Ouro, or you can have a character in the right level range (15-25, I think) use the Find Contact button to teleport to them. They're soloable in...30 minutes or so? I think? The challenge level is reasonable, although I think each of them has a big, exhausting fight sequence (defeat X, Y spawns, defeat Y, Z spawns).

If you take CyberGlitch's advice and go for the Incarnate prize (it's an involved process, but it absolutely lets you turn your characters up to 11), I'd suggest picking one character to do it with. Every night I've played on Virtue, I've seen people recruiting for I-Trials and the DA arcs, so it's still possible to get a group on at least one server.

Oh, and did you know that Fitness is inherent now? That was the same issue where they started the Incarnate stuff. If you respec some of those old characters, they'll have up to three extra power choices.

Some of the new powersets, individual powers (e.g., Beast Run), plenty of costume pieces, and vanity items like frisbees and costume change emotes. All of the recent new content, including the Signature Story Arcs and the Incarnate stuff, is free for VIPs.

Regarding the SSAs: All of your characters above level 10(?) should have a Signature Story Arcs option in your contact list, right under the newspaper or radio. If you open it, you'll be able to get a sort of mini-Task Force from any contact that's in your level range. It exemps you down to the max level if you're over, so as long as your character is at least level 40, he should have access to all of them. There are different but mirrored arcs for heroes and villains. I've only played the first two on each side, but I like the villain ones better so far. I'm going to say each took half an hour to solo, give or take.

Regarding Incarnate Trials: They're definitely different from any other content you may have seen. They're basically big multi-phase boss fights like you'd see in a WoW raid. If you've ever been on a Hamidon or mothership raid, you'll probably have some sense of the scale of the event, but I-Trials are a little more focused. Some people love them, some people hate them, and, on Virtue, we still run them. For some reason. Sorry, I can't speak for any other server.

There are also Incarnate story arcs that you can in theory run solo. Once you unlock a level 50 character's Alpha slot, a contact will try to lure you to Dark Astoria. I'm not finished with those arcs either, but they're well-written, epic, and substantially more challenging than normal content. If you want to become a god, apparently you have to work for it. You'll also get contacted by a Praetorian named Belladonna Vetrano, who will recruit you to wrap up all of the Praetorian storylines you currently know nothing about.

So how do you unlock your Alpha slot? You can get an arc from Mender Ramiel in Ouroboros. (It has at least one fight that's really hard to solo, so be careful.) You can also tag along on I-Trials or Incarnate story arcs, or go street sweeping in Dark Astoria. Once you have that unlocked, you can start figuring out the complexities of the Incarnate system, which I'm not even going to attempt to summarize.

This x1000. It’s something that’s always bugged me about City of Heroes: It uses Default MMO Open World Design.

That’s where open space that isn’t used for shopping or training is filled with loitering XP-sacks. Whether they’re orcs or boars or Hellions, they serve the important purpose of waiting for somebody important to come along and kill them, so that they can be reincarnated five minutes later as exactly the same thing. This is just how MMOs are designed because this is how they’re designed.

CoH handles this better than most MMOs. For one, open-world spawns seem to have some kind of purpose and life. They’re out there to steal a purse (eventually), or preach to their adherents, or act out the messy Nazi vs. Discount Nazi grudge match. Their chatter is what gives zones a lot of their life (and I bet everybody has a favorite Hellions or Skulls line). Also, because of travel powers and a shortage of Kill Ten Rats quests, open-world enemies are much less irritating in CoH. If you’ve played fantasy MMOs, or Champions Online, you’ve probably had an unpleasant experience where you had to fight your way to a quest objective one spawn at a time, and then discovered that all of those enemies had respawned, so you’d have to fight them a second time on the way back to the questgiver. In CoH, pretty much the only time you get this feeling is when you’re trying to get to a mission door in Perez Park. Other than that, you can skip the intervening swarms of enemies and get right to the start of your mission.

But street spawns still have one glaring problem: They’re ridiculous. Paragon City is carpeted in criminals. There are tens of thousands of them, and no matter how many times you clear them out, they’ll be back in minutes. When contacts do give you Kill Ten Skulls missions, they basically want you to show the baddies who’s in charge, not to actually make things better in any meaningful way. Fortunately, the villains never successfully make things worse, either, but it’s still pretty demoralizing if you approach it from any standpoint other than “this is just how MMOs are designed.”

So how do you design it differently? You have to create big open city zones because flying is awesome. If you create these zones but don’t include anything to do in them, then they feel dead and boring. So how do you add challenge to the open world without turning it into an absurd Villain Preserve?

I was thinking “open Safeguard missions.” Every so often a neighborhood goes under siege. If nobody does anything about it, criminals or monsters will take over the area, drive out civilians, and generally make the place look like Kings Row. A lone hero who comes in can clean up parts of the neighborhood, finish a side mission here or there, and generally street-sweep indefinitely. If more heroes show up, they can split up to put out fires (literally and figuratively), or team up to take on the leaders of the flare-up. Once enough enemies have been beaten, the neighborhood goes back to normal, and heroes can either move on to the next crisis or hang around to roleplay being Saviors of the Gish (or whatever).

My biggest problem with the idea is that it’s complicated. Getting the frequency and intensity of neighborhood attacks right would take a lot of fine-tuning. If you could pull it off, though, it would make the open world feel much more compelling. I’m sure some players would love the sense of being meaningful defenders of the streets, and if it were balanced right, it would be as viable a leveling path as clearing out warehouse after warehouse of slightly-used gangsters.

TLDR: Zone events good! Mob-pastures bad!

I was hoping we'd find out who did these! These arcs are some of my favorite writing in the game, and at this point, I've seen most of it. The endings for Collateral Damage and Last Rites were epic, and I admit I choked up a little at one point (you know when), but they don't even compare to the sheer joy of Ruben and Hammond's stories. (Everybody reading this, if you haven't played these arcs yet, go play them now, now.)

There's some good writing in general on redside, but it's definitely harder to get those stories just right. It seems like you really get the mindset of the villain, the way every conversation has the undertone, "When would be the best time to betray you?" Ruben's and especially Hammond's arcs really gave me that feeling that I was playing a scheming mastermind, that I had agency and the ability to adjust plans as they inevitably spiraled out of control. And how sweet was the Hearts of Darkness Class Reunion?

Thank you, sir. Thank you for giving us the chance to feel like supervillains. There's more maniacal laughter in the world because of you.