InfamousBrad

But only if we go up to them and ask for a job. And we can always turn them down. Not even vaguely how police or soldiers work.

The absurdity of this was obvious in the last MMO to try to create the fiction that player characters were in the military, Tabula Rasa. If Tabula Rasa had been like a real military, when you logged in, it would have told you where to go, and what to do, and if you hadn't done it, your character would have been deleted, or at least suspended for however long you were sentenced to punishment duty. Because they knew that subscribing players would never tolerate that, they instead created this BS idea that "logos sensitives" were a special rank that was outside of the normal chain of command, gifted psychics that actual military officers had to beg or bribe into accepting assignments, while still in military uniform. It was the fakest thing I ever saw.

But inherent in almost all superhero fiction, going all the way back to Superman, is the idea that superheroes are above the law. There are literary and historical reasons for this that I don't feel like going into at this time, but suffice it to say that when they wrote the "hot pursuit" doctrine into the game's backstory, when they made national borders and national laws irrelevant to any superhero chasing a supervillain, they had ample comic book and gaming history precedent for writing what they did ... even if it's one of the scariest ideas in the history of literature.

It'd be an unpopular game for at least one other reason. Players hate taking orders from NPCs.

The best stuff available at the time is out of my budget by at least a multiple of three. It also violates my rule of thumb, when building frankenboxen, of using the best available components from 18 months prior, right when the prices drop.

This? Or am I being too optimistic? If it's any more expensive than that, it's out of my budget.

The "hot pursuit" doctrine regarding superheroes and supervillains is, indeed, a massive stretch. When I first read it, I thought it was openly deranged. But now that they've written more game story, including alternate timelines, I see what they're getting at, and why they did it. Excuse me while I wax philosophical here (and while I quote TV Tropes to start):

From an artistic standpoint, the authors of this game world faced one nearly insurmountable obstacle: The Status Quo is God. They wanted to set the game in a world just like our world, but with superheroes. But if there'd been superheroes since the 1930s, would the world really have turned out just the same? The same WWII, or similar enough that you'd have to squint in 2003 to see the difference? The same Cuban revolution, the same Vietnam War, the same Cold War in general? If you answer those questions "no" then you're up against the problem almost all science fiction games have: you have to start your game with a long, dull chunk of expository text that nobody reads but the 5% of us who are roleplayers, just to tell people who their characters are.

So to make the game commercially sellable, to make their art accessible to a larger audience, they made the decision that very early in superhero/supervillain history, a decision was imposed on the world by its most powerful and popular superhero: supers are above normal law. All of you who aren't supers are governed by your normal laws, your normal political processes, your normal economy, and so forth. Those who are super are above all of that: they cross national borders at will, ignore any laws they want, and are judged solely on their motives and results, and only in the court of popular opinion (if that) and in each others' opinions. 5.9 billion "normal" humans go about their normal lives. 0.1 billion supers live as if they were on an entirely different planet.

It's not at all surprising that a classics major came up with this solution: this is how the Olympian Gods lived and worked. They bribed, cajoled, and tricked humans during the chaos of the Archaic Dark Age that followed the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations, with an aim of setting up new, law-abiding, peaceful, moral societies ... while themselves continuing to wage open and covert war on each other, robbing each other blind, mating like minks with each other and with any other species that caught their fancy, and generally behaving in ways that they themselves would harshly punish if they caught us doing it. Why? Because blood, not ichor, runs in our veins. Because we do not consume ambrosia and nectar as our food and our drink. Because when we do it, it matters, because we're mortal, and fragile. They are neither, so they can live by different rules without facing the same consequences.

In the City of Heroes universe, what's the alternative to privilege (private law) for supers? In the City of Heroes multiverse, attempts to impose human law on supers always ends with it happening the other way around, the supers rule the humans with an iron fist. Whether it's the Reichsman inheriting Hitler's mantle of leadership, or Nemesis ruling his brass city in the Shadow Shard and seeking to conquer all universes, or Tyrant declaring himself benevolent dictator of all surviving humans, or Lord Recluse (the most "liberal" of the bunch!) setting up a rudimentary balancing act of supers-against-other-supers while, frankly, over-ruling them all at whim because he can.

To me, this makes the City of Heroes multiverse one of the most frightening dystopias imaginable, one whose philosophical premise is that if the gap in human ability levels widens at all, the weakest 99% of the human race can only become the top 1%'s cared-for pets or driven slaves, as in Walter John Williams' Aristoi, like non-Sparks in the Foglios' Girl Genius. It would improve my opinion of the game if Portal Corporation were to find even one parallel dimension in which, on the day after Brass Monday, The Statesman used his power and prestige to bully every super-human who wanted to fight crime to join the police and submit to the local police chief, who wanted to fight for their country to join their country's armed services and serve under the authority of the commander in chief, in which superpowers were treated like any other implement of force wielded by a human being.

But that's not the world that Paragon Studios wrote.

Yes. Yes, indeed, that is "standard procedure" for the MMO industry ... for losers. If you look at just about every MMO that has ever shipped, you see that the subscriber numbers ramp up fast the first three or so months, then decline steadily from then on. Contrary to industry hopes, paid expansions followed by layoffs do not turn this decline around, they merely slow it down. Every. Single. Time.

And if you look at the numbers across the industry, only three games, in the entire history of the industry, have never had that "peak fast, decline until the servers go dark" curve: WoW, EVE, and the paid version of Runequest. What do those three companies have in common, other than the fact that all three of those games are perceptibly, visibly, obviously, remarkably, and unambiguously worse games than CoH? Their publishers and developers never went into cost-cutting mode. They kept reinvesting in the game, which gave players the confidence to stick around even when things weren't going well, which generated steady revenues, which resulted in constant, steady improvement for all three of those games. They didn't all do it the same way; they have different shipping schedules and different mixes of paid versus free expansions. Didn't change the outcome. The only thing they had in common was three different companies that were in it for the long haul, that knew that their development budget was only going to go up, never down, and were okay with that when they decided to get into the business. Revenues followed.

I love this game. And I've never been shy about saying so. But you can't deny that it's under the "tender care" of an MMO company that just plain flat-out doesn't "get" MMO customers. And that's why Lineage I has been steadily declining for ages, why Lineage II only stole customers from Lineage I and didn't check the decline, why Exteel has been in "maintenance mode" since it shipped and dropped off the radar, why Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa are dead, why Dungeon Runners has an announced death date, and, yes, why this game has hemorrhaged users absolutely reliably and consistently since the mass layoffs that followed issue 6.

(Guild Wars, on the other hand, has remained steadily profitable. But then, so far as we can tell, Guild Wars is the one NCsoft title that's never had mass layoffs; like Blizzard, its developers shift seemlessly to the next expansion as soon as each one ships. Coincidence? Or ancient astronauts?)

NCsoft is now engaged in a new-to-the-industry experiment to see if the industry-standard decline curve can be turned around once it's gotten entrenched. They've never managed it before. No one ever has -- because it's never been tried. They obviously think that it's possible, or they wouldn't have doubled down their bet on this game and then doubled it down again. The experience of companies as diverse as Activision/Blizzard, CCP Games, and Jagex Interactive has shown that they cannot fail (unless public opinion is too thoroughly poisoned against the game by the slow pace of improvement during the Freem 15 years) ... except by committing the standard form of MMO company suicide, by losing their nerve and trying to cost-cut their way to long-term profitability. What they're doing now may not work. What I'm afraid they'll do if they don't see results fast enough to suit them, though, is something that has never worked. Ever.

You're right. If, in fact, there is no benchmark they have to hit? If, in fact, there is no deadline by which they have to hit it? If, in fact, there is no consequence for failing to hit some benchmark or deadline? They're screwed. Because given NCsoft's history, nobody in their right mind would believe them if they said so. You are absolutely right that that's not fair. Which is why NCsoft should never have painted themselves into that corner in the first place.

I think it was the Tabula Rasa thing that screwed them up the hardest, that angered the most people. Because literally right up until the day before they announced the server shutdown date, they were promising new development that people were going to love. Literally: the day before. As late as the day before, developers were giving interviews to Massively and other game sites, and posting emails to Tabula Rasa fan websites, about the future development schedule, and how wonderful all the new features were going to be. People who were pointing at how far TaRa had gone over budget, who were pointing at how little commitment to the game the Garriotts themselves were showing, people who were pointing to visible in-game evidence that subscription numbers were sliding fast, were told by other players to shut up, that we didn't know what we were talking about, because NCsoft was promising everybody that the game still had a great future ... and then boom.

Out of curiosity, can anybody name even one proposed feature that the developers have put on a timeline for after Going Rogue? I can't think of one. Which means that we have even LESS assurance of a future for City of Heroes, if Going Rogue isn't a huge hit, than Tabula Rasa subscribers were being given right up until the day before the shutoff date announcement.

I'd like to think that NCsoft's commitment to this game is open-ended, that they don't care what happens to the subscriber numbers, that they're going to keep the current development staff at 50 or more no matter what happens, that the servers would never be shut off no matter what happens to the financials. I would very much like to believe that. But I'd have a hard time believing that of any company, and I sure as heck couldn't make myself believe it regarding NCsoft.

So, again, I ask: what metrics has NCsoft set for "minimum success" for CoH and/or CoH:GR, with what deadline, how are those metrics doing, and when and how will we know?

Whenever NCsoft is involved? Yes. And I'll tell you why:

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When you catch a child with a cookie that they just stole out of the cookie jar, and you ask that child "Did you just steal a cookie?", the child truthfully answers "No." How is that a truthful answer? The child has truthfully answered the question that they heard, which is not the question you asked. You asked, "Did you steal a cookie?" What the child heard is, "Do you consent to a spanking?"

When you tell your manager, "I heard a rumor that I'm going to be laid off in three months, is it true?", your manager truthfully answers "No," even if he has been informed that yes, you will be laid off in three months. If he has been informed that you will be laid off in the next three months, how is his answer a truthful one? He is answering the question that he heard, which is, "Is it okay with you if I don't do any actual work for the next three months, and instead work on updating my resume and finding another job?"

When you ask NCsoft, "Is one of your MMOs in trouble, are you considering shutting it down?", NCsoft always truthfully answers "No," even if they have already set a metric that they suspect can't be met and a date on which the shutdown will occur if that metric isn't met. If they already know that the game probably isn't going to hit that metric and they've already picked a shutdown date, how is their answer truthful? They're truthfully answering the question that they heard, which is not, "if I spend my recreational time leveling a character up and equipping them, and recruiting my friends into a group to play your game with, am I wasting my time, should I instead be looking for a different game that'll still be here a year from now?" The question they hear is, "Do you want an extra $180 from me between now and when the game shuts down, or not?"

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Look, here's what we all know. In the last year, NCsoft has doubled their initial investment in the game, buying out Cryptic. And they've tripled the annual budget for maintenance and development. Several months after they made that announcement, for the first time in four years, they stopped reporting quarterly subscription numbers for City of Heroes. In the intervening 8 or 9 months, we haven't seen much evidence, from where we're sitting, that subscription revenue has gone up.

Now, it's possible that add-on pack revenue has gone up enough to pay the increased expenses; in that intervening time, Paragon Studios has been pretty aggressive about selling add-on packs and other micro-transactions, probably raising the average subscriber cost by $5 to $10 a month for costume packs, extra character slots, character renames, character moves, paid respecs, extra mission-architect slots, and so on. So maybe NCsoft Corporate is happy that their investment is producing revenue growth. But we'd be crazy to believe that, given NCsoft's track record.

Several games in a row now, NCsoft has gone for the Hail Mary pass on failing games: invest heavily in one last major expansion that's supposed to fix all of the problems with the game and make it so exciting that subscription revenues grow explosively. Several games in a row now, when all those expansions did was slow the hemorrhage, they have pulled the plug. And every time, so far, that they have done this they have lied and lied and lied to our faces about whether or not they were considering pulling the plug right up until about 2 weeks before they pulled the plug.

If you do read the comments over at Massively, one comment you will see on a regular basis is that because of those lies, there are thousands of potential customers who've sworn to never play another NCsoft game ever again. People who can't be persuaded to give City of Heroes: Mission Architect or City of Heroes: Going Rogue or even an unrelated game like Aion a fair chance, because they are just that angry about being lied to right up until server shutdown. Maybe if NCsoft corporate had told us the truth about, for example, Tabula Rasa or Auto Assault, some (but by no means all!) of the players would have packed up and left for other MMOs. So lying to those people for a year did milk them of another $180 or so per person lied to who only stayed because they were lied to, however many people that was. I hope NCsoft really enjoyed that $180. It's the last $180 they're ever going to get out of them. No matter how good their future games are; they sacrificed all future revenue, from that customer, by lying to them for that last $180.

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What do we want? Well, frankly, what we want is for this game to succeed.

But whether or not the game is going to succeed, what we really want is to break the legacy of lies. From where we sit, it seems patently obvious to us, based on NCsoft's past management practices, that when they doubled-down on City of Heroes, they almost certainly set a metric that the game had to meet, and a date by which it had to meet it, or they are going to pull the plug. What we really want, right now, is to know four things:

1) What metric for success did NCsoft set for City of Heroes?
2) What's the deadline to meet that metric before they take action?
3) Is City of Heroes on track to meet that metric by that deadline?
4) If City of Heroes does not meet that metric by that deadline, which seems more likely to you? That they will do what they did when CoV didn't meet its metric, and merely slash 75% of the development budget, or if they will do when Tabula Rasa and Auto Assault and Dungeon Runners didn't meet their metrics, and pull the plug on the servers?

If we don't get an answer to those questions, we will assume the worst.

If we get answers that tell us what the metrics are, and when the deadline is, and why you think you'll make that metric or why you think the game will survive the inevitable cuts when it doesn't, we'll be quietly relieved.

If we get an answer that says, "there is no deadline and there are no metrics," we're going to assume that you're lying to us, and even if you're not, there very probably isn't anything you can do to convince us otherwise, not after all the times NCsoft has lied about this subject in the past.

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And THAT is why the comments over at Massively.com are so negative. Any further questions?

I don't know that I agree with you about the male walk. I can't put my finger on all of the things that are conveying this to me. I know it has something to do with the set of the shoulders and the angle of the head and neck; I suspect it has something to do with the way he sets his feet and shifts his weight. But the male walk animation is almost as exaggerated in its self-confidence as the female walk is. It's just a little less obvious, because the trick to walking like a man is less well-documented. If BABs were to put up a brief video of a female character, even one in a dress, using the male walking animation, I think you'd see instantly what I meant.

Assuming that they're not going to some day release "prestige walks" to let you pick your emotional content (I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that, considering how long it took them to get around to making even one walking animation per character skeleton), they had to pick one set of body language per character skeleton. As I read them, what the male characters' body language says is, "Nothing here threatens me. Or impresses me." What the female characters' body language says is, "I know full well how good I look." (See: "Most Common Super Power.") What the huge characters' body language says is, "I could crush any given six of you, and we both know that, which is the only reason why I don't have to." For superheroes and supervillains, and given that it's an optional feature you have no obligation to use whatsoever, those are not the worst default personality choices they could have made, not by a long shot.

I blame the fact that they took so long to nerf psi-monks, so the game turned into Monk-ocron, more than I blame Dome of York, even with its ugly avatars. (But dear gods, do I miss Neocron City.)

I always interpret that as being for the same reason that V blows up The Old Bailey and the Parliament building in V for Vendetta: to demonstrate that the superheroes cannot save you, to demonstrate that if you're siding with the superheroes because you're sure they'll always win, you're on the wrong side.

I know of very few more frustrating experiences than doing either a Mayhem or a Safeguard with a team. Solo, I can defeat a time-giving spawn in about 15 to 30 seconds (depending on the character), making them a net break-even or slight timer gain. With an 8 person team, we lose timer on every spawn we fight, which costs us all the lovely side missions ... and, not infrequently, costs us successful completion of the main mission.

I'm vaguely weirded out by the two examples (so far) of Mayhem mission hate. The Mayhem missions are, more than all of the rest of City of Villains combined, more than anything else, what I wanted City of Villains to be when it was first announced: picking my own route, searching for opportunities for crimes to commit, terrorizing the cops, recruiting a sidekick to show them how much better than them I am, destroying superheroes sent to thwart me. And all the more so once I reach Brickstown and have a guaranteed 4 or more side missions. If City of Villains had been nothing more than a long string of, say, a couple of hundred Mayhem missions, one for every neighborhood of every zone in Paragon City, I would have been happier than a pig in Congress.

Safeguards, a little less so, but only for two reasons. I do agree with the original poster that it gets old defeating a spawn of enemies to get a key and then finding out that the actual mission is on the far side of the map. And the constant running or flying back and forth as vandals spawn all over the map gets really old. And Safeguards lack the sheer joy of smashing up all of that stuff; there really needs to be more missions in City of Heroes where you go into a villain's lair and smash up their carefully-crafted super-weapons for bonus points. As objects decline in relative hit points, the later Safeguards make it way, way too easy to lose time to random spawns blowing up property. And even before then, the timer really gets tight; I still think the random enemy spawns should grant 30 seconds to the timer.

But aside from the lovely rewards, I "get" that Safeguards are a lot closer than anything else in the rest of City of Heroes to a realistic "day in the life" of a superhero: more things going wrong at once than you have time to respond to, villains who don't wait for you to show up to start their evil deeds, and so forth.

It feels to me like almost nobody "gets" that part of what's so cool about City of Heroes is the overwhelming variety of ways to level up, of ways to enjoy the game; people take each others' word for what's the most XP-efficient and loot-efficient way to level, and migrate to that in thundering herds. City of Heroes is a game where you can choose street sweeping solo, street sweeping in teams against more dangerous public enemies (hero only), stand-alone randomly generated missions, multi-part solo stories, multi-part team-required stories, "Danger Room" simulations, PvP and PvP zone missions, realistic "day in the life" superheroics (hero only), and intense terroristic crime waves (villain only).

Most MMOs would only have at most 2 or 3 of those choices. Yes, I admit, CoH could stand another balance pass on the content to make some of the less-chosen paths less disadvantaged relative to the others, so you don't feel like a chump if you try to recruit a team to street sweep Perez Park, say, or so you don't feel like you're wasting your time if you Go! Hunt! Kill Skuls! But one the list of things I love this game for is that it has all of these viable choices, and they all work; it's a marvel of game design.