Eisenzahn

This is actually something I've been doing in my whole history of MMORPGing, and really started to notice back when I was heavily into FFXI.

I keep track of "Zone Boundaries" where I live. For example, I live on the southern slope of a pretty big hill. Near the top of the hill, my city officially ends and the next city north of it begins. That's a Zone Boundary. There's a Carl's Jr. right at the top of the hill that's about half a mile from me, and another south into my "Current Zone" that's about three miles away, and I instinctively go to the one farther away rather than cross that boundary.

Further south, there's a bridge crossing some railroad tracks, beyond which is a mall, a Costco, a movie theater and a Wal Mart. The bridge constitutes the southern Zone Boundary. To the west, within the same Zone as my apartment, there's a similar cluster of mall, movie theater, etc. It's about a mile and a half further away, but since it's still in the same Zone as my Home Base, it gets preferential treatment.

Looking at the small map of my local universe, I'm starting to realise how much of my Zone Boundaries are actually influenced by local bus routes (I'm a terrible driver, and keep my car in the garage as a service to my fellow human beings unless there's a really pressing need)... but some of the boundaries are wholly irrational. For example, there's a strip downtown with a lot of fast food, the juncture of several major roads, and the main local freeway exit. Traffic is always horrible there, but as I'm more frequently on foot, that doesn't actually slow me down any. The pedestrian crosswalks will operate on the same timer whether or not the streets are full of vehicles. Even so, I habitually avoid the area as unacceptably "Laggy", much like the crossroads overlapping the Cap Au Diable Black Market.

And finally, there are only a few local shops that I recognize as "real". The Carls Jr. is "real", because I eat there all the time. The McDonalds across the street from it? For all I know, if I clicked on the door it would tell me I can't enter... or the interior would actually turn out to be a bank or a cave or something. I just have a hard time accepting the fact that it's got an interior, with people working there or going in to obtain food, even when I can see them right through the windows. That's just an illusion, like how a city street full of NPCs doesn't mean there's that many players on. If they're willingly eating at the McDonalds, they can't be real people, can they?

When I bought into this franchise, it was with City of Villains, and just City of Villains. I no longer think of City of Heroes as junk code wasting my harddrive space, but I still identify overwhelmingly as a CoV player. Are we ever going to see any substantial development of Villain content in Regular Issues that adresses some of the gaps that have been in place since City of Villains was first released? For example:

- Strike Forces covering all level ranges, and Silver Mantis made accessable without a base computer.

- More zone contacts who will just introduce themselves (or be introduced by the previous level range's contacts), rather than requiring us to go back to Newspapers and Mayhem Missions every five levels.

- Any non-respec Villlain trials.

- New Villain zones offering alternatives to some of the more often repeated content (especially in lower levels).

- New Patrons with a wider range of power themes for their pools.

- Zone Events. Currently we only have global ones like Rikti and Zombie invasions and seasonal events. Also, more Giant Monsters. I am genuinely shocked that "Son of Atlas" or somebody like that isn't hanging around outside Grandville 24/7 hammering on the walls with fists the size of dumptrucks, or that the Devil His Own Bad Self has never gone marching through the streets of St. Martial howling for Johnny Sonata's soul and looking for bumpkins to challenge to fiddle contests.

- Cooperative content with a villainous bias, much as Cimerora and the RWZ have clear heroic bias. Stuff where the heroes who show up to help wind up with some ugly decisions to struggle through for "the greater good".

- More story content featuring our Villains fighting against actual Heroes (who aren't Longbow).

- Entirely New NPC Hero Factions.

I accept that CoV has always been the lesser draw for most players, and I don't expect development to shift overwhelmingly to the red side. I'd just like to see more Villain content that wasn't developed first for Heroes and then shared with the other side as an afterthought. Since the comparison has often been made that CoV content is frequently better written but lower in quantity, I'd suggest that any additions to Villain content be matched by revisions of existing Hero content for fairness (and to keep the much larger part of the customers happy).

Interesting. I'm definitely intrigued by the notion of dedicated "End Game" content. I've certainly been hoping for something to do with my purpled-out Electric Brute a bit more compelling than throwing her at quantities of Rikti that make the Battle of Thermopylae look like a kid's softball match.

My main complaint remains, however. It's been four issues since we had a quantity of new story content that I felt at all enthusiastic about. Until I see some confirmation that this trend is over, and that story updates are going to start being major features of upcoming regular issues again, discussion of how full of goodies Going Rogue may be just feels like you're trying to convince me to buy something I thought I was already paying for.

Also, if War Witch is going to be in charge, her character needs to become a fightable NPC in the game rather than just a static trainer, so we can vent our frustrations on her in effigy.

It's hard to say if I'd use bots or not if they were approved. I honestly don't see all that much difference between using a bot and setting up an AFK healing or damage badge farm, which I've done many times. It's just a matter of how complex the actions are that you can get your computer to spit out without you there directing it. On the other hand, I already felt uncomfortable setting up those AFK farms, and that was for pure vanity rewards that have no actual impact on gameplay. There'd need to be a community-maintained list of "safe" bots explicitly approved on the forums or somewhere before I'd indulge, I think.

My very first character had a whole huge extended family with a vast elaborate backstory that only mattered to me. Now, only Eisenzahn (Nin/Nin Stalker) remains in CoH, while the ninja clan surrounding him has been repurposed as NPCs in the Exalted tabletop setting.

My main (Elec/Elec Brute) has a startling array of clones, extradimensional dopplegangers, and echoes from timelines that may or may not come to pass. There are currently six other versions of her, one for each AT with Electric or Storm powers. If Electricity Control ever gets developed for Dominators and Controllers, I've got names reserved and concepts worked out. I've got a name saved for a Mastermind version of her too, but a primary that fits the theme as well as I'd prefer is pretty unlikely.

Currently the following versions exist:

Lunaticia - Elec/Elec/Mu Brute, the original. Founder, president, and currently only member of the Captain Mako Appreciation Society and Scrapbooking Club. "Mu Cataphract", but operating outside Scirocco's authority, mainly because he and his Mu Mystics got sick of trying to channel her chaotic impulses in a productive direction.

Mu'Luna - Elec/Storm/Mu Corruptor, a homonculus-clone grown at Scirocco's direction after he decided it was too much trouble to re-educate the original, but that her mystical potential was too great to squander.

Pandemonika - Elec/Elec Scrapper, the Praetorian Doppleganger. Or maybe not, depending on how much Going Rogue invalidates her backstory. In her dimension, she married the heroic Admiral Mako and with him founded the Sharkhead Island Defense Force, a super team dedicated to keeping the slumbering Leviathan a secret from Tyrant and his servants. The SIDF was betrayed by one of its own members, and Pandemonika was forced to seek sanctuary in Primal Earth. It's unknown if there were any other survivors.

L00N471C14 - Elec/Elec/Mu Stalker, from a dimension where Luna joined the freakshow instead of Arachnos, because she'd become obsessed with Dreck instead of Captain Mako. A concept that deserves being fleshed out further, but I just hate how Electric Armor performs for Stalkers too much to play this variant very often.

Catastrophilia - Elec/Elec/Elec Blaster. A clone escaped from Crey's Revenant Hero project, this version's cellular structure is too unstable to channel lightning directly as a close combat shield or to command more complex storm manipulating magics, like most of her other incarnations. What she lacks in control though, she makes up by having the most raw power of any variant. With an incomplete set of crey-generated false memories, she finds her development as a Hero hampered by her physical resemblance to a top-ranking Arachnos Operative, and is a very strong candidate for falling to villainy.

Dr. Monika Fujita - Storm/Elec/Elec Defender. An echo from a future that's now unlikely to come to pass, where Luna's supervillain activities were just a short phase, and she used her ill-gotten gains to put herself through college as a Marine Biologist like her father. Returns to present day Paragon City to attempt to prevent the catastrophe in her own timeline that awoke the Leviathan.

Ame no nuhoko - Elec/Elec Tanker. In Reichsman's Axis America, the Hawaiian Islands fell to Japan in WWII, and that world's version of Luna (a Hawaiian native of mixed Hawaiian and Japanese descent in all her incarnations) was recruited in early childhood to become a member of the Emperor's personal bodyguard. Relations between the Japanese and German empires had soured decades before her birth, and it's no surprise that multiple attempts were made on the emperor's life during her brief time in his service. When the sixth (and final) attempt succeeded, she was commanded by her superiors to flee to Primal Earth in posession of a number of occult artifacts and documents posessed by the Imperial Guard, which they did not wish to see fall into the German's hands. She tries to bury her feelings of shame and guilt through tireless service to the common people, and sees it as a personal holy calling to try and reform this dimension's native version of herself.

As far as the WoD MMO goes... I can't name my sources, so feel free to accept or disregard this statement based wholly on your personal opinions of me, but it's vaporware. It's deader than Duke Nukem. It's been considerably more than a year since any resources were applied to developing the idea, and even when they were still planning on it they were mired in the concept art stage.

Part of the problem is that the New WoD has just never caught on to the same degree that the Old WoD did. A lot of people at White Wolf really really wish they'd jumped on the MMO bandwagon back during the few years when the Old WoD was consistently matching or exceeding D&D's share of the market, but none of them can talk themselves into putting out an MMO based on a property that's been out of print for nearly a decade, no matter how awesomely popular it used to be.

To start off here, I should mention that I'm a City of Villains player who only got City of Heroes when they added both sides to all accounts a while back. There aren't very many of us, so it's not much of a surprise that development hasn't focused on making the game work well for our style of play.

One of the most consistent complaints about Villain-side content right now is that we spend far more time fighting other Villains than we do fighting Heroes, and when we do fight Heroes, one group hugely overshadows all the others combined. I don't foresee the development team making any meaningful additions to content in the Rogue Isles ever again, so it falls to players using the Mission Architect feature to put together some ideas.

Let's have a look at the hero groups currently in game.

- Longbow: Appear more frequently as mission antagonists from level 1 to 50 than anyone else, overshadowing all other Villain vs. NPC Hero content combined. Even then, appear far less often than you spend fighting other Villains. Only bosses seem to be "Superpowered", although a few of them use some super-tech. Even with a decent variety of troop types, stretched out over the entire level range they wind up feeling quite repetative.

- Wyvern: Seem to get phased out eventually. They're tied for second with the Legacy Chain, but still miles behind Longbow. Come in two varieties.. three colors (and ranks) of guys with a bow, and three colors (and ranks) of guys with a bow and a jetpack.

- The Legacy Chain: Make a big splash early on, and then fade away like Wyvern. Very good variety, though. In my opinion, the most interesting Hero faction to fight, for the very brief span they oppose you.

- Paragon Police Department: Faced from level 5 to 50, but almost exclusively in Mayhem Missions. Tremendous variety, but spread in such a way that there's usually only a couple different types in each level range.

- The Luddites: Isolated to Cap Au Diable, exist only to foreshadow a Villain you'll probably wind up fighting, in a story you get conned into by a Hero in disguise. We can forgive them for setting up yet another Villains vs. Villains storyline though, because a lot of their dialogue is hilarious.

- The Scrapyarders: Similarly isolated to Sharkhead Island, edge out the Luddites by having their own Superpowered Elite Boss/Hero/Giant Monster Allies. But lose enough Hero Points to not really count by being industrial terrorists.

- The Dockworkers: Scrapyarders Part 2. Most players won't even realize this is a seperate faction. As normal guys using industrial equipment to fight mobsters, I have a hard time even putting them on this list. At least the Scrapyarders have a bunch of supernatural leaders.

- The Vanguard: Heroes, but you join them anyway, and the only ones you actually fight are renegades.

- The Midnight Squad: Heroes, and you only rumble with them in some of Darren Wade's missions before becoming a member.

- Ouroboros: Conspiracy theories about Mender Silos aside, this is another group professing an interest in saving the world and recruiting your Villain to do it. And you don't even get to fight them. That's three Hero Groups you're an official Badge-Carrying Member of now! Hooray!

- Cimerorans (Loyalists): Once again, good guys, allies, only fought in a handful of missions.

- The Freedom Phalanx: Elite Boss/Hero class enemies almost always accompanied by Longbow. I think Manticore shows up with Wyvern support troops once, but I can't remember for sure. May as well just get retitled Longbow High Command.

- The Vindicators: Same as the Freedom Phalanx. Infernal runs with the Legacy Chain in lower levels though.

- The Regulators: Two members in game, both function as members of other groups (the Freedom Phalanx or the PPD), only one of them an opponent you can fight.

- WISDOM: Currently only two members in game. Both appear with Longbow Support.

- The Civic Squad: All named bosses, appear in two missions. But with PPD support! Good for them for not being Longbow stooges!

- The Dawn Patrol: Only two members left, the only one you fight had to be absorbed into a major Villain Group before he became a viable adversary.

- Hero Corps: Don't even appear as fightable NPCs. Exist only as historical footnotes and Mission Difficulty Adjusters. Most players on both sides mistakenly believe they're a part of the same corporate entity as Freedom Corps and Longbow.

- The Paragon Protectors: Turns out, they're actually villains. At least they have superpowers...

- Others: Ravenstorm, War Witch, Castle, etc., never even appear as opponents.

One big thing I noticed here? There's a definite tendency among those factions that even include minion and lieutenant ranked enemies to focus on Weapons (so mostly Natural origin, with a few special weapons that drift into the Technology origin). And those that break that trend mostly do so with Magic (Legacy Chain, Luddites, Midnight Squad, Vanguard Sorcerers), the notable exceptions being PPD Kheldians and Psi Cops. Heroes with a Science theme seem restricted to Boss rank and above (since the Paragon Protectors are actually Villains), and if there are any with a Mutant theme, I can't think of them off the top of my head. PPD Psi Cops, maybe, but Psionics seems to straddle the divide between Mutant and Natural in this setting. This makes sense though, since Mutant and Science origins tend not to result in masses of guys with the same ability. Still, it gives us some untouched possibilities to focus on.

So that identifies a few areas I want to target for the group I'm personally planning. A Hero Group that features enemies of all ranks from at least Minion on up (underlings only if I have a good idea), features clearly superpowered Minions and Lieutenants instead of just guys with guns and/or swords, could span a very large level range and reasonably become involved in the stories of several of the Rogue Islands, includes its own Hero and Elite Boss class enemies instead of borrowing them from other teams, and isn't going to try to buddy up with Villains instead of fighting them. That's a pretty serious list of requirements (especially given the MA memory limits), but I think I've got something that works. I'll get to writing the faction up while I let others contemplate their own ideas.

I personally wouldn't be anywhere near as cranky about the lack of news this week if they hadn't dragged out the announcement on the Modified Rikti Invasions as long as they did. It feels like they're trying to distract me, and with my confidence in the development team already at an all-time low after four issues with negligible amounts of new story content, I am in no mood to put up with that kind of manipulation. My own account persists because I still enjoy the Mission Architect feature, but more importantly because I bought a subscription length that was, in retrospect, excessive. And also because, even with my intensely frustrated state with the development team, CO is still too big of a sack of crap to offer a viable alternative.

Masterminds. I have a couple stalled in the teens, both with concepts that I absolutely love, but I just can't get into the playstyle. Maybe it'll be better when each of them have enough powers from their secondaries that I won't feel like I'm just standing around all the time.

Things I want to do on 2XP Weekends:

- Farm vast quantities of prestige for my solo VG.
- Earn giant heaps of infamy at the same time.
- Pick back up any higher level characters who have stalled out, and see if I can jump start my interest in them with a few levels.
- Start characters that I normally wouldn't think of playing, because they don't handle very well in early levels.
- Team a lot more often than I normally would.
- Make a killing on the Black Market taking advantage of the fairly predictable post-2XP fluctuations in a lot of common items.

Things I actually do on 2XP Weekends:

- Lag
- Rubberband
- Slideshow
- Freeze
- Mapserver
- Log out

At least I've been able to take "Reload the server list for twenty minutes until Virtue isn't red" off of that list, the last couple 2XP Weekends.

My ex was a gamer. I started writing a song about her when we broke up...

"She broke my heart,
She stole my Wii,
She ERPed as a Futa...
In Pocket D."

But then I decided it would be more productive to just get drunk.

...

Anyway, good luck!