Righteous_Fury

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No recent response to an issue -

Many times, if you do not see a response from the dev team about an issue then either investigation is ongoing and no conclusions have been made yet or the dev team is satisfied with the issue as it is. I want to stress that even though this may be the case, they are always reading your feedback and taking it into consideration.

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If several subscribers post with a specific concern about implemented changes, the developers need to reply and tell them that:

a. It's going to change
b. It's not going to change, ever
c. There is the potential for change

That way, the player knows immediately where they stand. If you change a power that I have been using in a specific manner for the duration of my gameplay and I find that change detrimental, then I and any other players who consider it detrimental need to know up front that there is no chance it will be changed.

No reply at all makes it appear as though the devs simply do not care, regardless of whether they do or not.

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This also extends to Issue content - we try to add a little something for everyone each issue. Every player has things they consider their priority for new content. Some love costumes, some like new art, some new story. We try to even it out to give everyone something. There is only so much time in the day - but we work as hard as we can to make the game better.


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I'm sorry to say, but Issue 4 appears to have introduced many more bugs and detrimental changes to game mechanics than it has content. It's the first issue I've actually been disappointed in. Even though the Arenas were a huge undertaking, I wouldn't consider them content.

The Kheldian storylines are nice, but right now the content is limited to those who already have level 50 characters.

So, when combined with what I personally consider detrimental power changes, a lack of real content and some game bugs, Issue 4 has just really been a disappointment.

Meanwhile, we still can't buy inspirations during a TF from the TF contact.

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I have seen comments that state that if the devs are going to be devs then they should grow a think skin and learn to take the insults. We disagree. We care an awful lot about this game. We pour our hearts, minds, and energy into making this game. Many of us have spent years of our lives working as hard as we can and trying our best to make the best game possible. We want players to have fun. We stealth team with lowbies to hear the reactions to things like super jump for the first time. To experience the joy of a great pick up team take down an AV.

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I am certain that the developers care about this game. Which is why it is so confusing that in the last two months it appears as though the developers have embarked on an effort to tear down the game they created and replace it with something that is less dynamic, less exciting, less fun and just generally less superheroic.

Honestly, the more changes I read about... for example, the latest proposed enhancement changes... the more I begin to think that the developers have lost their compass on the design and intent of this game.

CoH is coming to resemble less and less the game I loved and unfortunately I'm hearing that from more and more of my SG mates.

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Hurtful insults and disrespectful comments affect us. We are human. To have people disrespect you and insult you and something you have worked so hard on in front of the whole internet is disheartening and demoralizing at the very least.

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That is completely understandable. Everyone likes to hear that their efforts are appreciated and admired.

That said, you have to consider that your subscribers have feelings as well... and you're going to hear their frustration and anger just as often as you hear their praise.

Add in the fact that this isn't a purely altruistic venture, i.e., you are being paid to develop the game by your subscribers, and the sympathy factor goes down just a little bit more during those times that cause your players stress.

I'm not at all happy with the direction City of Heroes is taking; I see a game development that is moving toward slowing the game down from its frantic, fun, edge of your seat gameplay where you could accomplish things every time you logged on to a slow-paced grind where it takes hours and hours to accomplish anything of substance.

I left other games that revolved around those concepts behind to come to CoH.

Yup, DaemonsBlade and Zavber, you have both mentioned the one MMORPG that actually defined what a third generation MMORPG should be: Asheron's Call. I purposely didn't mention it because in the realm of MMORPGs it broke the mold. The funniest part of that was it did it before 3/4 of the current crop of MMORPGs even existed!

- Free monthly updates which included new equipment, new quests, new monsters AND an evolving storyline.

- An enormous, contiguous land mass with no zoning dotted with dungeons, ruins and places to actually explore. You could run across the landscape and literally DISCOVER things that no other player had seen before.

- A dynamic world that changed EVERY MONTH. Everything from the addition of cities and landmasses to the destruction of beloved cities and outposts.

- An excellent crafting system, especially in the area of spells; spells actually required components and the components had to be combined in specific ways to learn a new spell.

- An incredibly detailed skill system.

- Combat that allowed you to literally fight HORDES of monsters; you felt like a hero.

The few detractors I saw during my odd year and a half or so in Asheron's Call:

- Combat, while dynamic, could be repetitive; especially if you were a swordsman or other melee type; it was basically hit this button for this type of attack, and there were only three attacks, high medium or low. No styles, etc.

- No mounts, at least during the time I played. Now mounts weren't actually necessary since you had a running skill you could improve until you were literally flying across the landscape... but it was still a pretty big landscape!

- The ease with which players could dupe items; it just damaged the economy too much and caused rollbacks. If you weren't a duper, you still had to suffer through a rollback that might drop you a level back, removed hard to find items you had just traded for, etc. That was very annoying. To their credit, the dev team did often reward players with items, etc, when such a situation occurred, but still; ugh.

- Lag. The same type of lag that many WoW players faced and are probably still facing. The problem with a contiguous land mass is that a display of latency does not accurately reflect how much lag you are actually enduring as a result of failure of databases to supply information. Which means that you can be in the green zone as far as latency is concerned, but completely locked in place, unable to move, while the server takes actions, i.e., the monster beats you to death while you stand stock still. AC veterans and WoW players are very familiar with this.

Unfortunately, Asheron's Call 2 just chucked everything that made AC1 unique and ground-breaking. Great graphics, I'll give them that; but the world was sterile; no NPCs to speak of, really, no vendors, you can't enter buildings, no ruins to explore, the world never really changes (ie., the premise is that the cities we knew were destroyed and we were supposed to be able to rebuild them.. to my knowledge, that still hasn't happened.)

It was a HUGE step back in MMORPGs.

Everyone I knew was looking forward to AC2 as Asheron's Call with a facelift. Now it appears that the original AC is going to get one. That would certainly be worth watching.

Now CoH has many of the same elements that made Asheron's Call so engrossing; a changing world, new places to explore, new monsters to fight, events, new acrchetypes, new powers; all in a completely different tableau. I am very interested to see what they do with the SSOCS.

And we're still getting this content for roughly $15 a month.

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Does the guy who wrote this article know NOTHING about the MMO market? From all that I know about this update it is not that much bigger than any other MMOs 3 months worth of updates, actually more like 4 months. Especially if Cryptic keeps with its habbit of heavily recycling, which it looks like they are.

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Although the author of the article obviously had multiple errors in the type, I would have to ask you the same question you just posed; do you know ANYTHING about MMORPGs?

Because I don't know what MMORPGs you've played, but just as a simple example, I played EQ for a year, paying $12.95 a month without a single free update of any merit. Period.

Unless you consider actually fixing code errors, balancing powers that were imbalanced from the outset, fixing zones that existed at release or the odd, ridiculously simplistic and extremely limited single-zone "event" an expansion.

An Anarchy Online subscription costs $14.95 per month. Notum Wars, an expansion, introduced... well, vehicles mostly. Another feature that was touted in beta but was absent from release.

AO hasn't had a notable update since release. They had a hard enough time with the client and their network starting out. Every update I saw were simply tweaks to existing systems that were broken from the get-go. The patch history can tell that tale.

A DAoC subscription costs $12.95 a month. Other than the addition of Darkness Falls, I saw nothing I would consider a notable update any kind before the Shrouded Isles expansion. Even Darkness Falls couldn't seriously be considered an expansion, because only a limited amount of the subscribers could enter it based on their control of keeps for access.

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90% of the "new" powers are essentially old powers that have been nurfed a bit and given to an AT that does not have them in their primary/secondary sets.

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Which is still a major update, since no other MMORPG that I have played made any effort to add complimentary power sets within the first seven months of release. Instead, they nerfed existing powersets or simply ignored the issues.

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New zone looks like it only has about 10% new stuff. all of the old zones look almost the same. All they ever add in these "massive" updates are the same old stuff coated in a thin layer of new art.

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Spoken like someone who hasn't actually travelled to every zone and/or area available. Because if you had honestly travelled the Shadow Shard, you'd know that at the very least the art is completely new and incorporates a villian class that didn't exist prior to the Rularuu invasion event which occurred after release.

Anyone who pays attention would notice the changes to the primary release zones themselves; additions that have been put in preliminary to the release of a future update which is also free. For example, check the description of the Foggy badge.

Dark Age of Camelot released in October 2001; they finally delivered on guild/regular housing in their Foundations release, in 2003. I'll give it to them, though; at least it was free. As it should have been, since it was a promised feature all through the classic DAoC beta. It wasn't until just before the game went gold that beta testers realized there would be no guild housing.. heck, no housing at all. Finally, two years later, they deliver.

Here's what DAoC brought out in their first expansion pack, Shrouded Isles:

New graphical engine with spectacular new visual effects (the single largest reason to actually purchase this expansion)

Three new island continents, in which to explore and adventure (one per realm) (so really, one new continent... because you're only playing in one realm at a time)

One new player race per realm -- three total (again, really only one new player race, since you would have to play characters from all three realms to play each new type of player race)

Two new player classes per realm -- six total (see above)

All new ambient music soundtrack (ok, I guess)

Revamped user interface (Which could have been released as an update.)

The Shrouded Isles expansion cost $24.95 at release.

Notice that several of the items in their retail expansion look suprisingly similar to items we are getting in an update?

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Odd thing is he says most publishers would box this up and charge $15 for it. Well when you consider that we pay $5 more per month than some of the older MMOs and it is about 3 months worth of updates, then we ARE paying about $15 for it. So, I guess he is right. There IS one publisher who would charge for this update.

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Hoo boy, that is one long, blatant exaggeration. Most publishers do and have published retail "expansions" for the same content we are getting in updates. And we certainly aren't being charged $5 more for it.