InfamousBrad

Yay, new buildings and new map types!

If this is hero-only, I'm going to be very, very cranky. I'm also hoping it's not co-op. I'm also hoping that the villain side ones are actually different, villainous, story arcs, not "oh, you're a hero now" story arcs like in RWZ.

I understand why time travel stories have to be at least level 25, since that's the level for Ouroboros. I'm not sure the post-35 game needs that much more content, though, really? I'm especially sure of that on the villain side, which I still say desperate needs some alternative content in the level 15 to 25 range, especially 20 to 25.

And as a matter of artistic preference, I would like to say this though. After this, can we have a break, ideally of at least another year, before adding more time travel storylines to the game? I realize that CoX doesn't have all that many of them, but it's a very, very tired trope in science fiction this last decade or so. We're overdue for some 3rd world jungle warfare stuff, some outer space stuff, an undersea city, maybe even more alternate history stuff through Portal Corp and through that old Mu portal in Nerva. Like Nemesis, things stay fresher and more intriguing if you don't use them up by flogging them until they die.

From the article:
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As Lead Designer on the project, I have had a lot of control over what happens in the City of Heroes game, but in the past I still had hurdles to get some great ideas actualized. With the new studio, a lot of ideas that couldn’t take hold under the old management are being implemented into the game with outstanding results. ...

ho achieves level 50 in City of Villains. The current Hero and Villain Archetypes will benefit from Powerset Proliferation, where we took over twenty existing powersets and gave them to Archetypes that didn’t have access to them before. If you ever wanted to play a Controller with the powerset of Plant Control, now is your chance! Psychic Blasters are now a reality, as well as Axe and Mace wielding Brutes. With Powerset Proliferation players now have even more character combinations to choose from.

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"I win!" That was my immediate knee-jerk reaction, to literally yell that in an empty room. I've been one of the people arguing since issue 5 for just exactly this feature. And every time anybody has brought it up, what we've been hearing is the counter-argument that archetypes need lots of archetype-exclusive powers "to feel special." Silly me, I always thought that their unique functional roles made them special, not any exclusives on various elements.

Now the truth comes out: blame Jack Emmert. Who is gone now. Le roi est mort, viva le roi!

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I may have been lucky, but I've never had my *first* round of missions from my first contacts go to the red zones.

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You're kidding. Never?

Now, I admit that what I know best is Atlas Park. I got into the habit back when it was the only way to avoid Vahzilok, but it's also less ugly than Galaxy City. (One big depressing industrial park.) And no matter which of the five origins you take, no later than mission 2 from the starting contact is going to send you to the far end of Argosy Industrial Park. That's level 5-6 Hellions, Clockwork, and now Vahzilok (and the occasional Infected). Worse, it's generally in the southwest corner, which is actually kind of tricky to get in and out of.

So what we're asking new players to do is to navigate a 3D maze, where the ramps aren't all obvious, with huge buildings in the way, where if they take a wrong turn they can find themselves at point blank range of two lieutenants and four minions that are all four levels above them, get insta-gibbed, and have to start all over from the hospital and try it again.

The thing is, as I mentioned above, we know that NCNC wouldn't do it that way if they had it to do all over again. How do we know this? Because when they did have it to do all over again, when they were designing Mercy Island, that's not how they did it. There's nothing above level 4 in all of Darwin's Landing. Upper Mercy, the 5-8 zone, is walled off and no mission refers you into there prior to level 5.

You still end up with blind alleys. You still end up with a few 3D mazes and a few places where, if you don't know the map from long experience, you end up having to back track a quarter of a mile and go around. Not everybody thinks that's fun, but it's part of the MMO experience. But it makes an order of magnitude of difference that unless you just stop and stand there and take it, it's almost impossible to get killed by mobs on the street during those first five levels while you're learning your way around the game and its user interface. No, really; CoV did it better, had the benefit of experience when they were making it, and they need to spend a little time and money to bring CoH up to the same standard if they want to grow their subscriber numbers.

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Hmmmmmm... wonder what this means for upcoming issues.

Rikti will still be invading for at least the next two issues.

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I'm afraid what it means is that just as Superadine will always be a new drug that was just discovered when you're level 2, the Second Rikti War will always have just started when you're level 35. No matter what's coming in issue 12, the Rikti War Zone is here to stay. Not what I had in mind when I heard that issue 12 was going to resolve the Second Rikti War plotline, but then, I guess that's not how MMOs work.

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Can someone throw a newb a bone?

1) A previous poster mentioned getting a toon to a level that's capable of helping, does that mean the invasion will be limited to higher level zones? Currently my highest toons are 12th.

2) If the invasion takes place in lower level zones (KR, GC, stc.), I assume the Rikti that appear there will be of appropriate level to the heroes who typically patrol those streets? No level 30 Rikti in Freedom Plaza, right?

3) Other than the obvious fun of doing something different and kicking some alien tail, what are the tangible rewards of participating in these invasions? I get the impression there are badges to be had and at least one weapon to be unlocked; if so, what are they? Any temp powers? Special enhancement/salvage/recipe drops?

I guess some of this info may be available at Paragonwiki, which is where I'll head now, but if anyone has any quick answers, thanks!

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ParagonWiki does have it all, but in a nutshell: whatever zone you're in, whichever "invasion event" Rikti you hit, it's your level. You "see" it as if it had the same hit points as an underling, minion, lieutenant, boss, or elite boss your own level.

The only catch is this. Have you noticed that as they go up in level, mobs have longer and longer attack chains, a wider variety of powers, more resistances? They're "actually" level 30 (except for the elite bosses, which are "actually" level 50). What's really going on is that your attacks are being scaled up to level 30 or 50, and their attacks' damage is being scaled down to your level when they hit you.

But it's not much of a catch. Remember, no debt during invasion events. Jump in, even if it's in a zone that'd normally be too high for you (the higher level mobs are all gone, remember). Join a team, have fun, get some XP, get some level 30 or 50 loot, earn 3 badges and an accolade and a temp power, lose nothing no matter how badly it goes for you.

No argument here. I've been saying for weeks now, maybe months, that the single most important thing this game needs to do is to revamp the level 5-15 game almost from scratch. It's so massively inferior to the rest of the game that it has to be costing potential subscribers.

Anybody who continues past a two week free trial (on the hero side, the villain side isn't nearly as hard) has decided to keep going even after ...
<ul type="square">[*]Being sent to Argosy Industrial Park, level 6 territory, with a level 2 character.[*]Running out of missions at level 4, with no contacts who will talk to them until level 5. (Even after XP smoothing.)[*]Having that first level 5 contact send them two zones away in order to fight Hazard Zone sized spawns of levels 6 to 9. Or, if they skip that mission and go back to the first contact ...[*]Having about a 1 in 3 chance of being assigned a mission door in Perez Park or on the far size of the Hollows before they're even level 8.[*]If they get to level 10 and enthusiastically attempt their first task force, being in for a roughly four hour slog ... that will completely and utterly fail in the 3rd mission, for your average pick-up group, because of the massive overlapping debuffs from having multiple Spectral Daemon Lords. And if he does get past that mission, all he's in for is another 2 and a half hours of same old, same old, with a totally anti-climactic ending.[*]And if he makes it that far, he'll have a sense that the street gangs in this town are all involved in some kind of conspiracy. But unless he lucked into The Bonefire Plot (odds against better than 6 to 1), he still hasn't had any actual storylines resolve, he still doesn't have any proof that any of the clues that have been dropped actually mean anything.[/list]Anybody who keeps laying City of Heroes after that is really determined to play a tights-and-fights game regardless of the annoyances. Anybody who was just looking for a fun game to play with their friends? Went and did something else.

Notice how many things they did smarter when they sat down two years later to write City of Villains:
<ul type="square">[*]None of the level 2-6 missions send you into an area where the mobs are above level 4. Not 6, not 15 (far side of the Hollows), 4.[*]Even if you just solo first contact only, you're still at least level 5. Do both of your Mercy Island contacts, and if anything, you're too high level (after XP smoothing), you're in danger of completely out-leveling half of Port Oakes. But at the very least, it is almost completely impossible to run out of contacts with missions in City of Villains now, let alone run out on your first day.[*]Neither Mongoose nor Dr. Geist refer you directly to another contact. No, to make sure you learn about the chance to earn a Raptor Pack or a Zero-G Pack, they refer you to your broker first. Only after you have had a chance to learn to fly at level 5 to 7 do they refer you to the storyline contacts that will send you all over the map.[*]There are almost no street-hunting missions prior to level 20. None of them involve Hazard Zone sized spawns. None of them require you to hunt mobs that are above your level. (Admittedly, then you get to Sharkhead at level 20 and the game screws you hard.)[*]Other than the newspaper missions, all contacts give short-story story arcs that have a clear beginning, middle, and an end that wraps up at least some plotline.[*]There is no level 10-15 task force, I know. But the first chance someone who starts with Villains gets to do an equivalent, a strike force, comes at level 15. Yes, it does involve multiple fights against Ruin Mages and Spectral Daemon Lords, and one mission that spawns a long stream of player-targeted ambushes with Longbow Wardens. But the whole thing is over, even for an inexperienced pickup group, in not much more than two hours. And it ends in a custom map that looks like nothing you've ever seen before, after fighting a big-name superhero, and then fighting a giant monster in a pool of boiling lava. Epic.[/list]NCNC knows better, now, than to run new subscribers through the kind of hellish nightmare bad experience that is City of Heroes level 2 to 15. They just haven't made fixing it a priority. I think that's why the game hasn't had a net gain of subscribers since issue 6.

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*sigh* I just want the damn thing to work right. Is that too much to ask?

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Yes. There's a hard and fast unbreakable rule in any kind of engineering, including software: "Fast. Cheap. Good. PICK TWO." And way back in 1986, customers chose Fast and Cheap in vast and unambiguous numbers. Ticked me off at the time, too. You want Cheap and Good, go run Linux. And while you're there, note that all of the Free and Open Source Software MMOs are running even farther behind schedule than Tabula Rasa did.

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So, would you rather have the Lady Gray TF or a revamped Positron?

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Revamped Positron. Hands down. That's not even a close call; I didn't even have to think about that one for a second.

Look, no matter how hard you work on retaining your 50s, some more of them are going to quit the game and move on to something else every month. Some of them out-grow MMOs, some of them really do get bored with the game no matter what you do with it, some of them run out of money, some of them even die. Some attrition is a fact of life. And frankly, you've done a whole heck of a lot in the last four issues for people level 40+.

No, the challenge you need to work on and do it right now is eliminating obstacles to bringing in and retaining new subscribers. Just from the ordinary dynamics of MMOs, 2/3rds of those will make their first character a Hero. And when they turn level 10 and are all excited about getting to do their first ever task force ... how many of them quit the game the next day, thinking "wow, this is all I have to look forward to, the same old stuff only even more aggravating than the missions I was already doing?"

I'm standing firm in my opinion that this game's number one need is not more story arcs, more power sets, more high-level raids, or even (as badly as they're needed) more strike forces. I wouldn't even elevate any of the few remaining game balance issues, like the desperate need for a substantial stalker re-design, to the top of the list.

No, the number one thing this game needs, if it's ever going to increase its total number of subscriptions the way that NCsoft is counting on it to do, is to go through the mind-bogglingly awful and horribly out-of-date level 5 to 15 content and bring it up to the same standard of quality as the later stuff, as the stuff that you're designing now. Less mind-numbing repetition in the first two task forces. Fewer street hunts, especially fewer street hunts that send you to hazard zones. More customized maps where needed. More distinctive-looking named bosses. More clues dropped to indicate that yes, you really are working on ongoing story lines that are either about to wrap up or that are going to be ongoing all the way to level 40 or whatever.

And for the gods' sake, you spent the last two months training new hires on the mission-editing system. If you didn't use that awful content as classroom exercises for them, why in the heck didn't you? You could have killed two birds with one stone; I'm still holding on to some hope that you did just that.

As much as I'd love more stuff to play with, I'd even more rather have more new people to play with -- not least of which because it'd fund your efforts to give me more stuff to play with even more. You need to stop patting yourselves on the back for doing more or less as well as EVE Online. In case you failed to notice, EVE Online is still growing. You're not.

Maybe I'm off base on why people don't choose to subscribe after a free trial, why they cancel after their first month. I know from quitting other NCsoft games that NCsoft asks people why they quit. So, Lighthouse, you tell me: how many people say that its because of repetitive and dull content, versus how many people say that there aren't enough powersets, versus how many people say there isn't enough high level content? What do your own in-house surveys of exiting users tell you, especially the ones who quit so soon that you barely got any money out of them?

1) NCSoft is optimistic about Tabula Rasa? Then they're smoking crack. There is no way to put enough lipstick on that pig to cover up the fact that the gameplay is terrible. That they sold $5M the first month merely tells you how many people there are who wish there was a strong SF MMO out there. Tell me what the third month numbers look like. And, for that matter, tell me how much of a ghost town TaRa turns into the month after Stargate Worlds comes out this year, unless I miss my guess.

2) That they're very good at retaining customers in City of Heroes is good. But that the average amount of time a subscriber has had the game is 17 months is not something to be cheerful about. It lends credence to my suspicion that we're getting a lot fewer new people, these days, that the low level zones are almost entirely filled with alts of 30 month veterans. It would really be a good thing for this game if NCsoft's marketing department found some way to expand the audience they were marketing to.

If Lineage continues to hemorrhage subscribers to WoW and TaRa tanks, NCsoft is going to need to double or triple the subscriber base for this game if they want to stay relevant in the pay-per-month MMO market. That's going to take more than adding incremental content, that's going to take finding customers in places NCsoft has never bothered to look and marketing the game in whole new ways.

3) I'm having a very hard time reconciling "we're going to knock your socks off this year" with prior warnings not to get our expectations up too high for the next issue, or maybe for the one after that, either. After the disappointment I felt over the last issue, if nothing truly spectacular comes out prior to December, that's not going to be a "knock my socks off" year.

I love this thing. I would have loved it more at $4.99 than at $9.99, but feel no resentment at buying it. For the amount of work that goes into a collection of themed costume parts, I don't mind paying extra since, I agree with several people above, it's not like you haven't also given us more free costume parts than any three other games on the market combined.

(You know what I'd really enthusiastically pay $9.99 for? A Shag costume pack. I've been thinking for weeks about writing that idea up for the Suggestions forum.)

Having bought it though, I do have some costumer's nitpicks. Some of these have also been stated above, but these are my particular issues, in no particular order:

1) The separate-color lace pattern on the skirts is beautiful. It is a crying shame there is no top that can be matched with them. I understand that there's a UI limitation on tops w/skin and a 2nd color. But if we can't get around that, can we at least beg a regular top with the same lace pattern, one that is two-colorable, for making that as a dress? It'd make a great steampunk look.

2) Both male and female, the Bow Tie is available with Jackets, but not with Sleeveless Jackets. Is this a bug?

3) My gut instinct is that not even the most garish prom tux would have the lapel color match the waistcoat color. What I wish Jay had done instead is use a texture to darken the lapels, but otherwise leave them the color of the jacket. The pocket square should match the waistcoat color, but not the lapels. (Although speaking of the lapels, nice geometry on these!)

4) Please tell me that it's a bug that the veil color has to match the hair color?

5) There's an existing problem with the Tuxedo jacket that's even worse with these two new jackets: there are no male pants that come even close to matching them. The regular Pants are the right texture, but obviously jean cut. The Slacks are close to the right cut (although cuffs that big are years out of style, in our world), but not even close to the right texture. (In fact, they're not really the right texture for the Suit jacket, either. They don't really match anything.)

6) None of the gloves patterns go at all well with Hearts Plus. The Bridal w/Lace boots are merely okay with Hearts Plus, and shiny leather is almost okay, but none of them really match either. But then, these are hardly the only Tops w/Skin and Bottoms w/Skin that have this issue; there really aren't any gloves or boots that go at all well with the Metallic costume, either.

7) I can't duplicate it on a from-scratch character, but I had some weird clipping problems with the waistcoat from the two new jackets (sleeveless) and the underlying shirt on my old main character that wouldn't go away until I brought the waist way in.

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Since we have the upcoming &lt;a href="/showflat.php?Cat=0&amp;Number=10075054" target="_blank"&gt;Double XP Weekend&lt;/a&gt; starting February 8th - February 10th coming up next week, we wanted to find out how you spend your weekend maximizing your effort?

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The same way I spend every double-XP weekend: leveling a character that I suspect will be more fun once I get above the low 20s, but that's so painful from around level 11 to 21 that I can't ordinarily stand to play them. In past cases it's been stalkers and dominators, two villain ATs that I sense I'd love to play, but not in the low levels. (Ironically, I have never yet kept a character I PL'ed during double-XP weekend.) This time it was a WP/DB tanker that I ran, more solo than I'd like, from level 10 to 25 in a weekend. Now that I've got a continuous attack chain and a partial set of SOs, the character is already a heck of a lot less painfully annoying to play than it was at level 11, where the AT damage mod was making all fights take forever and where my attack chain plus a single toggle was enough to make me have to rest every other fight. Will I break the curse and actually keep this character, this time? Could be, could be.

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We have a "life at level" stat in seconds. This is how long a character spent at a particular level, logged in.

[/ QUOTE ]Wow, I wish you'd release that info! I'd love it more if the average was shown for each archetype, but failing that I'd love to see how long, on average, it takes players for each level and therefore from 1 to 50. Average for all players, not just us forum users.

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Uh, what would you propose NCsoft do, exactly? Let performance go down the tubes for everyone on Virtue to save you getting deeply angry and truly enraged?

A server can only hold so many players simultaneously before performance drops. LH is giving us a heads-up that temporary server locks might happen. I don't think they will, myself, but I appreciate the notice.

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How far "down the tubes" are we talking here? They just put in all-new server hardware, and subscriber numbers have been no better than stable since the last double-XP weekend. If they didn't lock servers, how bad could it get? It's not as if the zones themselves don't instance every so many players in, and it's not as if the back-end database servers didn't just get three years' worth of hardware upgrades all at once.

Lineage and Lineage II, both run by NCsoft, still have about a million customers each, according to the last data I saw. CoH and CoV have about 140,000. It's not as if NCsoft doesn't know how to manage the network and server load even if every subscriber logged in at once. Given how much money they're ploughing into it this year, given what they're obviously hoping the subscription numbers are going to be like in a year, this year's brand new servers had better be able to handle the kind of capacity we're going to see Saturday afternoon.

Otherwise, with no queuing, and no way to copy characters off once the server locks, what are they suggesting those of us who play on Virtue or Freedom do? Pay $10 per character we want to level on Thursday evening to move them over to some other server, then pay another $10 per character on Monday morning to move them back? Those are my choices? If I want to play 5 of my characters over the double-XP weekend, either give NCsoft another c-note in ransom, half of it up front, or hope that they're bluffing when they threaten to lock the servers?

Yeah, I don't think I'm being out of line being angry about this.

Uhhhhh.... yeah. Can't say what I want to say, the long and abusive string of obscene epithets would violate forum rules. So I'll just say that if I get locked out of Virtue this weekend, I will be deeply angry. I mean truly enraged. Locking me out of the only server I can stand to play on during double-XP weekend would tick me off more than any MMO company has ticked me off since a long-ago incident involving Funcom and Anarchy Online, more than what Sony did to SWG ticked me off. No, really; it had better not come to this.

Edit: Speaking of server performance, though, whatever you guys did to the blue-side consignment house servers, it wasn't enough. They're still awfully sluggish, and unless Thursday's downtime is to address that, it will presumably be even worse this weekend.

There just aren't any legs in the game that look good with the Robotic Claw feet. At least, not if what you're trying for is a robot. Like the Robotic Claw gloves, they're great if what you want is a cyborg.

Since you want a very robotic look and you seem to be very wedded to black and gray, try this: Full Helmets, Retro Tech head, Sat Comm in Detail 1, Detail 2 and 3 blank. Tight body, Techbot texture, Techbot color scheme. Large Robotic gloves, Tech skin. Sharp Smooth shoulders. Jewel chest detail. No belt. Tight legs, Techbot skin, Techbot color pattern. Large boots, Techbot skin, Techbot color pattern. With color set to copy over the whole thing, set color 1 to top row, #4 (medium-dark gray) and color 2 to black. Then go in and change the jewel color on the chest detail to something appropriate to your powers.

I think the totally blank, black face of the Retro Tech head screams "robot;" most of the other Full Helmets look to me like there's clearly a person inside. If you want something more face-like, check some of the Detail 2 options, especially Bunker Shield (or something like that, very robotic eye piece, straight line across). Cycloptix is good, too. Change the color of the eye slot to match the color of the chest detail's jewel.

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In most (if not all) other games, you ... start your career harassing the local natural life instead of fighting actual threats (about the same as going in Real Life Online and killing your neighbor's poodle to level up....and it drops some sort of gear/weapon!).

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I didn't include it in the original post because there are a few other exceptions; Puzzle Pirates comes readily to mind, and I'm sure there are others. But yeah. I can go the entire rest of my gaming life without ever again being told that at level 1, I have to hunt cockroaches, rats, spiders, and dogs. In City of Heroes/Villains, even at level 1 you're fighting other people, the only worthy opponents.

Found another one.

Size Matters: In City of Heroes, they don't call a six-block (or so) area a "continent."

Do I need to say more?

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You forgot the godly customization, in almost every other MMO out there chances are you'll look at least 97% exactly like everyone else from your level, class and race (if this does apply).

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I didn't forget about it. It may not be the default, it may not be the norm? But this game is not even vaguely the first, or the only, MMO to offer it. As I said earlier in the thread, I ought to know; I was a master tailor in Star Wars: Galaxies (pre-NGE), and had a thriving side business selling good quality cloth to a master armorsmith on the same moon. Puzzle Pirates gives you fairly broad control over your character's appearance, too, if not anywhere near to the extent that this one does.

So trust me, I'm not knocking the costume creator in this game, I praise it every day, I think it would be easier to recruit people into this game if they would re-release (in English) that stand-alone costume creator that they gave out as a demo for the Korean version City of Hero. But what I wanted to call attention to, a week ago, were the things that City of Heroes/Villains got right that nobody else gets right. Amazingly, not even other games from the same corporation share those technologies. Why not? "Because that's how all other MMOs are."

No. See above re powers that are not in a story arc mission.

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It's an interesting thing in MMOs that a number of players out there do actually want every design cliche that the MMO genre throws at them.

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And then half of the players complain that "this game is boring, it's just like WoW" and the other half get cranky whenever new players use WoW jargon to describe things. But yeah, the argument for not innovating, even if there is a better way to do things, is that people don't have to learn anything, and are therefore instantly comfortable. So goes the theory, anyway.

I could argue that at this point, anybody who wants a game that's just like EQ/WoW is playing WoW, because that's where all their friends are. If they want to pick up players, new games need to show at least some innovation, offer something that people can't find in EQ/WoW. CoH/CoV does that in spades.

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Also, and most importantly... NO [censored] GIANT RATS. I swear to [insert diety here] that if I have to spend five more minutes grinding wolves/snakes/stupid STUPID rat creatures! just to get their heads which may or may not drop, I'm gonna jab something sharp into my brainpan.

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Not entirely unique, but very nearly, yeah, and worthy of praise. One the list of things I've always given CoH/CoV credit and thanks for is that I'm almost always fighting other people. It's okay with me if I never again get asked by some game to fight a cockroach, rat, spider, or dog.

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Wait... you played SWG before coming to City of... and didn't appreciate all these things from the get go??

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Ah, but that's the thing. Remember the only MMO games I'd played before that were Anarchy Online and Neocron. I thought that the parts of SWG that sucked (pre NGE) were all unique to SWG. I had no idea that their malevolently awful mission structure was copied from every other MMO in the market, for example, or that their teaming and chatting systems were no worse than anybody else's. Besides, I gave SWG a ton of credit (pre NGE) for its own innovations, like really good player-created town systems, and eliminating NPC vendors altogether in favor of a thoroughly player-run economy, and making armor something that had as many drawbacks as it had virtues. I'm not at all surprised that there's a volunteer effort of open-source programmers trying to re-invent SWG 1.0 from scratch; that game had a lot going for it. Of course, it was less than half done, but which MMO hasn't that been true of at launch? No, the problem with SWG is that they never did fix anything that was broken with it at launch, choosing instead to spend the programmer-hours they had on making it more and more Everquest-like, and to make the player characters more and more Mary Sue-ish. But none of that is to the point; my point is that at the time, I had no idea how common the problems with Everquest were in other games, I had no idea that almost every game on the market, including WoW, was busily and enthusiastically copying the worst features of Everquest. Nor did I realize, until this week, that they still are.

To those of you who brought up character customization, the only reason I didn't bring that up is that I have always appreciated just how wonderful, and how innovative, the character customization system in this game is. Although, again here I must defend the early version of SWG -- I was a Tailor, after all, ran the definitive website for Tailors, and loved the fact that you could craft almost any costume, almost any character concept, you could imagine, including mass-produced uniforms for clans. It wasn't as flexible as this game's costume creator, nobody is. But this isn't the only game that makes character appearance independent of your equipment, at least not any more.

My main point in the original post was to give them mad props for things they've done right that still, three years after they did it, nobody (or almost nobody) has learned from. That's the amazing part to me, now that I realize it.

Samuel Tow: Yes, absolutely freaking yes, the Team Find button in this game is amazingly useful. I don't care how many people complain about blind invites; in other games, the only "invite" window is a broadcast chat message in the LFG channel. Well, at least in most of them you can apparently find and click-invite people on your Friends list, yeah - but see above regarding sidekicking, absence thereof in other games. The search window is something I took for granted after playing this game, and shouldn't have. Credit where credit is due. Yet another innovation that's pretty nearly unique to City of Heroes/City of Villains, one I wasn't giving them enough credit for because I didn't realize how few games had caught up to them in this regard yet.

Jessex: http://www.zenofdesign.com/

Here's the thing that blows my mind that other game designers don't "get" about the combination of travel powers and instanced missions, that pretty nearly only City of Heroes and Anarchy Online got right. Some times I only have half an hour or an hour to play, maybe less. What I want to do at those times is travel directly to an instanced mission, get the instanced mission done, fly back to a safe place to log out, and log out.

What appalls me, after playing this game, is looking over my mission list and realizing that just to get to where the (fill in the blank) mobs spawn, I'm in for half an hour of street sweeping each way, then 20 minutes to a half an hour of waiting for the right mobs to spawn and/or looking for them. That's something that City of Villains, in particular, almost never asks me to do, and after level 6 or so never forces me to do.

One way in which I'm different from a lot of you is that my MMO gaming history is at serious right angles to most of you: I literally never played any of the "popular" MMORPGs. I didn't go from Everquest to World of Warcraft to here; I went from Anarchy Online to Neocron to Star Wars: Galaxies to here. So there are a lot of things that, I only recently came to understand, are literal standards of the MMO genre, things that almost no other MMO designer can think past or around, things that 90% of all MMO players think are mandatory parts of the MMO genre, that I had literally never been exposed to. Then I went and played Tabula Rasa. And when I started complaining bitterly about it, specifically about features that it shares with another (deceased) MMO called Auto Assault, only then did my friends get it through to me that nobody understood what I was complaining about, because everything I was complaining about was how MMOs just naturally are.

So during this last week of the year, let me take a break from my (honestly, increasingly bitter) arguments about some of the things I hate in this game, especially since issue 11, to thank the City of Heroes/City of Villains development team for a long list of things that they did right that are so, so much more creative and innovative, so much more ground breaking, than I ever gave them credit for.

No Attribute Points: In hindsight, I don't know how I failed to notice they were missing. But I never felt they added anything to the other games; they were one more way to accidentally gimp your character by not making the right choices. Attribute points are a hold-over from the earliest primitive editions of D&amp;D, where every character had more or less the same armor and weapons and where your attribute points were the only customization there were. Where you got the guts to drop them completely from this design, and how you stuck to your guns when NCsoft management almost has to have leaned on you to put them in? I have no idea. But thank you for the courage. You removed some highly unnecessary complexity.

Ubiquitous Instanced Missions: When I started playing City of Heroes after coming here (in part) from Anarchy Online, I complained bitterly about the fact that roughly half of my missions were street sweeping missions. (Nearly all of Anarchy Online's missions are instanced. Or at least they used to be; Eris only knows what that game is like any more.) Only recently has anybody gotten it through my head just how rare instanced missions are in almost every other game, and how expensive they are to develop. Only literally just in the last week have I gotten it through my head that in almost every MMO in the history of the industry, you get maybe 1 instanced mission every other character level, on average over the course of your career, that 99% of the missions you get sent on are street sweeping missions.

Oh, and how did I forget to mention, at first, how amazing it is that your instanced missions adjust automatically to the character level? I took that for granted. Only in the last week did people get it through to me that fixed-difficulty instanced missions are something that the entire rest of the MMO industry takes for granted. The frustration of being given those missions 2 or 3 levels before your average player could complete them, and being told "if you can't complete the instance, go level up 2 more times and come back" is something that, bafflingly to me, the entire MMO industry does to its customers. Everybody, that is to say, but you. That's incredible. Thank you for getting that right.

But back to street sweeping for a second. Back when I started playing City of Heroes, I was complaining about street sweeping at a time when you'd cut the amount of searching all over the map for mobs of the right type and level in half already. Then you came out with City of Villains, where the amount of street sweeping dropped from half of all missions to maybe 5%. When I wrote my long list of broken missions in the level 20-25 range in CoV (and I still think that list is far too long, far longer than any other 5-level range in CoV), those "go street sweep against things 3 to 5 levels above you" missions that I complained about are, apparently, something that every player in every other MMO learns to take for granted will happen to them occasionally. Not knowing that, I didn't give you nearly enough credit for having figured out that you can come up with an equally time-consuming, equally fun, equally social game without that ugly feature. Thank you!

Flight: Right before I started City of Heroes, I remember watching a friend of mine cross the entire length of The Hollows ... with Hover. She was inordinately grateful to have that option at level 6; it was worth the interminable delay to her to not have to fight level 12 Igneous in Grendel's Gulch. And, like everybody else back then, she was designing her character around the assumption that she was going to take Flight or Super Jump at level 14. Nowadays, of course, all of the smarter players have Raptor Packs no later than level 8. In your game, no later than level 14, players who don't want to street sweep their way all the way to the mission door, going from enemy group to enemy group for a mile, against enemy groups that increase in difficulty to far above their level, can simply fly or jump up to the rooftop level and above and fly directly to the mission door. (A trick I used to also use in Anarchy Online starting at, if memory serves, level 20.) When mission doors are hidden in areas where the trees are grown together above them, making us thread ground-level mazes full of mobs, like in Perez Park or Primeva, some players, myself included, complain bitterly.

Only recently did I get it hammered into my head that almost every other MMO in the history of the genre considers the street sweeping your way a half a mile to a mile across the map, being forced to fight every spawn between point A and point B, to be the most important content in the game, to be an essential part of the MMO formula. That, I'm finally given to understand, and not the technical obstacles in 3D travel, is why other games are so resistant to flight. And I cannot thank you enough for having the courage to bet that you could continue to raise the development budget to replace all those endless hours of street sweeping with enough instanced missions to keep us playing for the same number of hours. No, really, no amount of thanks I could give you would be enough. Thanks!

Sidekicking and Exemplaring: A friend just pointed me to a blog in which a bunch of current and former MMO programmers are arguing about MMO design theory. And one of their most prominent articles, one they put a permanent sidebar link to, refers to the insoluble problem in all MMOs of what to do if you and a friend want to play together, but your friend has more time per week to play than you do? Pretty soon he's higher level than you; you can't survive his missions, and if he joins you for your missions, neither of you gets any XP. And I read that article, literally just the other day, with a kind of sick fascination. How could all these veterans of the industry not know that this problem got solved three and a half years ago?

And the funny thing is, an exemplar/sidekick system like yours is something that would be even easier to implement in every other MMO in the market. In every other game on the market, most of your combat stats are derived from character attributes that go up more or less linearly per level, and from the stats on equipment of whatever level you're using, which also increase more or less linearly per level. This means that for them, adding the ability to sidekick up to a friend's level, or exemplar down, could be added with not much more than one line of code, not counting the code to track distance between the mentor and sidekick. Because of the freeform power selection, City of Heroes has to memorize what order you picked your powers in, store that information as part of the character data, and adjust your power list on the fly as your level jumps up and down. (I do go back just barely far enough to remember when this didn't happen.) You went to the trouble of doing it, though. That's nothing less than amazing, now that I realize it.

That same game designers' blog insists that "the yellow exclamation point" (the yellow ring, in this game) that tells you that a contact has missions for you is the single greatest technological innovation in the history of MMO design. Garbage. The single greatest innovation in the history of MMO design is the sidekick/exemplar system, and because I didn't realize how revolutionary it still is, even three years after you introduced it, I didn't give you nearly enough credit for it. Thanks!

Cellphones: Because I didn't come to this game from an MMO that used contacts to give out missions (both Anarchy Online and Neocron use terminals that can be found everywhere to communicate with mission givers), I remember complaining bitterly in City of Heroes about how many times I had to run or fly all the way back to the contact before they would trust me with their cellphone number. I remember being extraordinarily grateful when you shortened that substantially in City of Villains, where almost every contact gives you their cellphone number after one mission for them, and most of the rest after two.

Only in the last week has somebody gotten it through to me that other games consider the travel time back to the contact, street sweeping your way the whole way back, to be an essential part of the content, just as I said about the need to walk everywhere, above. Which makes it almost ironic that the game that makes it possible for you to fly back to the contact instead of having to street sweep back to the contact is also the one that invented the in-game cellphone, that the game where it would be the least trouble to go back to the contact is the one that decided that it was still too much trouble. That was both innovative and incredibly generous of you. Thank you!

Extraordinary Forum: I never spent any amount of time on Anarchy Online's forums. Neocron, I remember, had very good forums. But when I blogged about Richard Garriott's bitter determination not to ever have an official forum for Tabula Rasa, only then did people point me to articles about the official forums in every other game, and why almost the entire remainder of the MMO industry wishes they had never turned theirs on. The horrific experiences I remembered from Anarchy Online and SWG, I had considered flukes, evidence of how malevolently awful and criminally stupid their customer service people were. Only now have I gotten it pounded into my head, by people who've played a lot more (and a lot bigger) MMOs than I have, how spoiled I am by the official forums for City of Heroes and City of Villains.

And here's the thing that really amazes me about this. I've played City of Heroes long enough now to have seen several lead moderators and several official community representatives disappear, to have to leave for personal reasons or to be poached away by other game companies. And every time it's happened, the entire player base held its breath, waiting for the inevitable decline into the same kind of horrific madness I remember from the SWG forums. But what happened instead, each and every time, is that the total unknown we got introduced to as a new forum moderator or as a new official representative to the community turned out to be at least as good as the old one, sometimes even better!

I've run enough online discussion groups and online communities in my life to know what a deft touch it takes. But online forums for these games bear a special burden: sometimes the official company rep to the forums has to tell people "no," and sometimes tell them "no" when they're good and thoroughly (and even sometimes not unreasonably) angry. There are ways to do this. At the very least, it takes someone who can get it across to people that they are being listened to, someone with the skill to actually hear, understand, and paraphrase back the complainers' arguments. Not many people involved in running MMO forums seem to realize just how important that one step is, that an awful lot of the anger comes not from people not getting what they want, but from people feeling like they're being held in contempt, that they're beneath the company's notice. There's also an entirely different tightrope to walk sometimes, and watching the moderators here do it taught me really how it's done. There's a gift, a skill, to telling people that the door isn't closed on their suggestion forever, to convincing them that the games' developers really are watching the game to see if the change the users are demanding is needed, that if actual evidence convinces the developers (somewhere down the road months from now) that the players were right that then the complaining players will get their way. Actually, that part is easy. The hard part is doing so without creating in the complainers the expectation that it's inevitable that they'll win.

I don't know where NCsoft is finding these people, or how they're taking ordinary moderators and community reps and training them to be this good. But only recently has anybody gotten it through to me just how rare and unusual this talent is, to what extent NCsoft has a near monopoly on it. And it's important to both the quality of the game and the quality of the relationship between us customers and you the company, it's the source of an awful lot of the goodwill between us. So again, thank you for making it look so easy that I never appreciated just how unusual and amazing you were being.

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Don't get me wrong. There are still things that I don't like about City of Villains, mostly balance issues and a few obnoxious missions. There are a awful lot more things I don't like about City of Heroes, mostly areas where some of the innovations I mentioned above haven't been back-incorporated into the design. I still think the sound quality in both games sucks badgers. I still think some enemy groups are way overused, and some storylines and villain groups are way underused. But now that I realize just how far the entire rest of the industry lags behind City of Heroes and especially behind City of Villains in overall level of innovation and customer service, I realize just how well and thoroughly spoiled I am. Thank you!