RuthlessSamael

I don't see any reason why contacts shouldn't give out their number the very first time you meet them as a general rule. Bugger, I don't really see why they shouldn't be given to me by the previous contact in the first place. If Alice is friends with Bob and apparently my confidant, why doesn't she just give me Bob's number?

I've decided to write up a general post wherein I, given my exalted position as Some New Guy You Probably Hate Already, tell you all how to fix the game. It should be remembered that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and it should also be remembered that the old joke where you immediately follow that statement up with an arrogant quip about your opinion always being the right one is just that: An old joke.

Anyways.

1) Rewrite ALL the things!

The new Galaxy City tutorial is actually really cool. It throws you right into the action, in a desperate situation that serves to provide a nice Act One sort of feeling (having acts one and two be covered completely in the opening cut scene is a big problem with video games in general). The new level 1-7 content in Atlas Park is similarly very well done (haven't tried the Mercy Island bit yet, haven't logged into the Blind Girl for close to a week now, should probably show her some love sometime). Icedrone or whoever from the Skulls mission had an interesting arc concerning taking matters into your own hands versus complaining to government suits to take care of things, Matthew Hashawhoever was an interesting character even if he was kind of short-sighted, and the mole at the end actually presented a very interesting moral dilemma.

Twinshot and friends aren't quite as compelling, but they're still of roughly the same caliber. They're distinct characters, many of them have a specific arc, and there's the whole "who's the traitor" bit going on with it (I haven't done the level 15 mission for them yet, but Twinshot's an obvious red herring and Flamebeaux's "too stupid for treachery" shtick is obviously a front, I'll be very surprised if I'm proven wrong), as well as introducing us to Manticore in such a way that feels appropriate to such an early point in my hero's career without making me feel completely insignificant.

And then I got to the Hollows and did the Flux and Julius(?) missions. These were fun to play for the most part, in that this is the bit where the game started actually getting tricky, and trading blows with elemental super villains felt right. The characters of Flux and Julius both had a lot of potential...Which was never really explored. These storylines don't really have any theme or statement to them the way the others did, and that really needs to change. Even if you don't want to rewrite the actual missions (and I wouldn't necessarily recommend you do so, either, because they're fun in terms of actual gameplay already), I would definitely recommend rewriting the dialogue. Take Julius' arc. Why do the Trolls want to dam the Red River? What exactly are they using their slaves for? What kind of overarcing theme can you attach to this?

Here's something that could probably be easily worked into the Julius arc that would give it some real punch. Back in high school, life just really wasn't treating Julius right. His home was broken and poor, his teachers had pidgeonholed him as a troublemaker, and thanks to that his efforts to revitalize his grades and actually graduate were pretty much stillborn. On top of all this, his girl-next-door love interest (let's call her Julia for now) eventually shunned him because of his pariah status, even though they'd been friends since they were kids.

His only friends now were the druggies, and being shunned by the rest of society, he joined the worst of them in doing harder and harder drugs. Eventually, he juiced up on Superadine and mutated, and thus began his life as a Troll, eventually moving into the Hollows. Julia,meanwhile, had come to regret the way she'd treated Julius as one of her stupid high school mistakes, and now was looking to reconcile. She'd heard he was in the Hollows, so she took a day off work to try and find him. She eventually ends up in the Trolls' clutches, and gets shipped off to do slave labor in the same cave Julius is hanging out in. Julia can't even recognize him anymore, but he recognizes her, and speaks with her, and she tells him why she came to the Hollows and begs him to let her go so she can find her old friend. Julius realizes that he's become a monster and tries to break Julia out, but he fails and barely escapes with his life.

This backstory is revealed over the course of the first 2-3 missions, wherein the Trolls are trying to dam the Red River in order to flood a cavern full of Igneous, which is still full of their former human slaves and even a bunch of abandoned Trolls. Julius asks the player to stop them from damming the river, clear out the Igneous, and finally to rescue the slaves, including Julia.

There: Exact same mission structure, but with a far more compelling set of characters who're on par with the new 1-7 content. Rewrites like this for all the old storylines would obviously be a lot of work, but I think it'd be well worth it.

2) Stop Putting Words In My Mouth!

As a general rule, giving my hero or villain a specific response to an NPC railroads their personality. In particular, I'm thinking of my main, Samael. He's terse and laconic and sometimes dips into the realm of the anti-heroic. The dialogue written for him often doesn't mesh well at all. Examples (paraphrased):

Aaron Thiery: Would you have become a hero if it weren't for the disaster at Galaxy City?
Mandatory Response: I would have become a hero regardless!
Response Appropriate to Samael: Yes.

Ice Super: While the government does nothing, I'm out here with the people!
Mandatory Response: I understand your frustration, but we all have to do what we can to help.
Response Appropriate to Samael: The people suffer and die while you waste your powers.

And so on and so forth. It'd be nice if, instead of a forced response, there was just a "continue" button, and we can fill in the blanks as to what exactly we said for ourselves. Otherwise, make it very vague. For example, with the one Ice Super in the Sondra Costel arc, have the options be "chide him for his irresponsibility" and "encourage him to help in spite of government negligence." Or whatever.

I realize I just spent about five hundred words telling you to rewrite the old plots because they sucked, but they were actually much better about giving generic responses that made it easier to fill in my own character's dialogue. You can have awesome customization for costumes and powers, but we don't have anywhere near the technology to customize human interaction, so just abstract it and let your players imaginations fill in the blanks.

3) Gameplay And Story Segregation

This has come up a lot in the forums lately. At level 3 or so, the Blind Girl is chewing through Longbow forces like they're nothing. At level 7, Samael breezed straight through an Arachnos horde. Also, rock-throwing citizens. One of the biggest pulls of the RPG genre is the steady advancement from weak baddies up to overwhelmingly strong ones. Longbow and Arachnos are both supposed to be trained, credible threats, and they shouldn't be put on the same level as Atlas Park Hellions. At the very least, drop an explanation as to why these ones are such insignificant threats compared to, say, Malta Operatives, who should be basically the same thing. "Longbow will accept anyone on the ground level these days. Bet they just pulled these volunteers off the street, gave them a gun and a uniform, and then shipped them off to Mercy Island to die. How very heroic."

Alternatively, you could excise the statistical increase from levels altogether. If the only major difference between a level 5 and a level 50 is the powers, inspiration slots, an enhancements, then it doesn't grate so much to be taking on trained soldiers from the word go. Yes, they couldn't really stand up to, say, the Outcasts, simply because of the Outcasts superior ability sets, but the fight would be close and the Outcasts have freakin' super powers, so that makes perfect sense anyways.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that excising half the level system is easier said then done, however.

4) I'm Too Heroic To Protect The Weak And Innocent

This is basically gameplay and story segregation part II, but with a different gameplay mechanic. I've been talking about the Aaron Thiery plot a lot, because I just barely did that one through Ouroboros since I accidentally outleveled him back when I was actually doing Atlas Park. This is because I feel bad about leaving mugging victims to their fates when passing through, even if the thugs con blue or green or even grey. Since there is an absurd number of muggings in Paragon City, I end up going out of my way to fight a lot of unnecessary mobs and leveling much faster than normal, and then that locks me out of interesting content. Content wherein Aaron Thiery berates other heroes for being lazy. Well of course they just run right past crimes in progress while on the way to Pocket D, if they didn't, they'd out-level their missions, their contacts would stop talking to them, and the really important stuff would never get done!

You should either be allowed to talk to any contact regardless of your level or, more preferably, you should be able to level yourself down at will, as if you'd been Exemplar'd or Ouroboros'd. This mechanic already exists, and allowing players more ready access to it should hopefully not be too difficult. It would make one of Ouroboros' purposes a little bit redundant, but it still covers the "ultra-stupid hard versions of old storylines" niche, as well as the "replaying old favorites" niche. Particularly since Ouroboros isn't something most players are even going to know about until much later in their super's career, whereas I obsessively crawl wiki's for information whenever I get bored of the game.

5) And You Thought Detroit Was Bad

Paragon City has astronomical crime rates and there's nothing you can do to stop them. This actually kind of takes the edge off of Super Heroing. It no longer feels like you're making much of a difference, because there's always a dozen-odd muggings going on within spitting distance of your trainers, the monorail, or other typical haunts.

DCUO actually has about 80-90% of their game world as non-war zones. There's no criminals mugging people, or shooting it out with the cops, or super villains running around wreaking havoc. It still grates that when you leave an instance having beaten a super villain, his minions are still running amok outside even as you leave, making it impossible to ignore, but at least you can get from point A to point B without feeling very non-heroic for ignoring all the crimes happening around you. Decreasing mob frequency would, at least, help with the feeling that criminals are infinite.

Guild Wars 2, while not yet released, has been talking up their system for observing how many players are currently participating in a fight and adjusting the number and strength of monsters to compensate, such that the exact same open-world mission will be of roughly appropriate difficulty whether you're soloing or brought enough friends to lag the server. If a system like this could be incorporated into CoX, it would be a huge improvement. In this case, however, the "right number" of enemies may well be "none at all" if you've already outleveled the area and you have no relevant missions.

For example, let's say that Samael is running through The Gish in all his level 16 glory. It's a slow day, and he's the only one in the neighborhood. The game sees that he's the only one there, and since the max level on The Gish's range is 8 and Samael has no "kill ten rats" missions active, so it doesn't count him as a hero at all. Since the game sees no heroes in The Gish, it spawns no criminals, and instead citizens will talk about how crime rates have been way down lately, and they don't feel unsafe walking the streets anymore. Alternatively, if it's a redside area that's been cleared like this, the place isn't cleaned up, it's taken over, and people will instead talk about how Subject Name Here is the new person in charge, and must be the terror of Subject Hometown Here.

Moving back to The Gish, let's say that Captain Awesome enters. He's level 10, but he has a mission active to defeat 10 Skulls, who normally spawn in The Gish (I think?). The Gish sees that Captain Awesome has an appropriate mission, so it counts him as a hero even though he's outleveled the area, and spawns roughly enough criminals to satisfy just Captain Awesome. If Samael encounters these criminals (and there won't be very many, since the game is only making enough to satisfy a single hero), they'll run away, abandoning whatever crime they were committing (i.e. mugging, assault, vandalism, loitering, whatever).

Then Star On Chest arrives. He's only level 4, which is actually below The Gish's range, but it hardly makes sense for the place to be all cleaned up for him already, and besides which taking on an extreme challenge can be satisfying in a way that muscling through endless legions of helpless foes generally isn't. The game counts him and Captain Awesome both (at least until Captain Awesome finishes his mission or leaves the neighborhood) and spawns enough baddies for two heroes.

The current density of criminals in any given neighborhood is enough to satisfy something like ten or fifteen heroes, no problem, so typically speaking the number of criminals in an area would decrease dramatically. In addition to raw numbers of mobs spawned, spawn rates should also be taken into account. With fifteen active heroes in the same neighborhood, you need a new mob to spawn and replace a lost one within five seconds just to keep up. With just the one hero, however, you can easily afford to wait 2-3 minutes before the replacement spawns.

I've tried to make this system such that it's immune to glitching heroes out of quests by refusing to spawn mobs they need and immune to griefers as much as possible, since the worst they can do is make the city the way it already is now, covered in criminals committing crimes. This is obviously a lot of coding work (I especially imagine finding a way to flag heroes as having an appropriate mission could be a huge workload), but I really wouldn't underestimate the difference it could make for game quality. You also might have a toggle that always counts your super for purposes of determining spawn rates, regardless of what level you are.



tl;dr It's kind of hard to summarize a five-point list into a single sentence, actually.

The problem with telling people to ignore a storyline they don't like is that it feels like skipping content. If there were an alternative "screw your stupid Well, I'm going to invent my own Well, and it'll do what I say and be covered in chrome" sort of plot, that would work. Since there's not, though, it plays like the game assumes you'll be beholden to the Well, so much so that it might even assume you are even if you choose to ignore Well content specifically because you don't want to be.

I've posted before about how there is no way to effectively measure how much of the game's population thinks one way or another, and that goes both ways. If you just want to smugly stand aside and claim that those who talk issue with the game's problems are just a whiny minority, you could be in for a nasty surprise. Mechanical/narrative disconnect is a major complaint throughout the entire gaming industry, particularly amongst the creatively driven players, and considering CoX's selling points boil down to "creative flexibility" and "spandex" that's not a small thing.

It should be noted that the content we're being encouraged to ignore is Incarnate content. There isn't a whole lot of Incarnate content in the first place, the more of it that's so bad large swaths of the playerbase are encouraged to forego it altogether, the less likely those players are to care about Incarnate content at all.

And what, besides Incarnate content, is worth paying a $15 subscription fee for? The people telling us to just not play the content we don't like are making a strong argument that we should stop supporting CoX altogether.

Your only combat power is "rude gesture" and your only travel power is "stumbling."

The ArchVillains need some kind of explanation as to why they're a threat again. Most comic book villains don't just show up again and are automatically threatening, the ones who do are guys like Green Goblin and the Joker. They're high-end from the start. Almost all villains, when they return, have a new trick up their sleeve.

And anyone saying that the story is fine because you can completely ignore it is really just admitting that the story is terrible. Some of us are only here for the story (or setting, or characters, or whatever) in the first place. If the story is terrible, we're done.

It's not how America works, it's how all of society ever works. If providing a service requires resources (servers, the time and effort of programmers, and etc.) then someone's got to provide those resources. If Paragon Studios doesn't make money, then they cannot keep the game online. It's not like there's some law that could be passed that would magically make food, medicine, and shelter infinite, and it's not like there's a bunch of European companies who are giving their product and everything to do with it for free and somehow not going under.

Alright, I'm going to make this painfully simple.

1) If we plucked a Bone Daddy from Perez Park and one of the rock-throwing citizens and had them actually fight in the actual game without changing any of their stats or abilities, the rock-throwing citizen would win, and the fight would not even be close. In fact, the rock-throwing citizen would probably one-shot the Bone Daddy.

2) According to the narrative, a rock-throwing citizen wouldn't even stand a chance against a Bone Daddy from Perez Park. Note that if they could, all the mugging victims we keep saving are mostly just being lazy.

Which of these two statements is either false of unprovable? If neither of these two statements are false or unprovable, then there is an inconsistency between gameplay and story, period, since the gameplay delivers the opposite result of what the story would imply. If you wanted to have a consistent gameplay mechanic wherein levels reflected a progression of time and not power, then you would not get increased health and damage as you leveled up.

If you think that the disconnect between story and gameplay is not a problem, that's an opinion. If you think it doesn't exist, you are factually wrong.

Incarnate stuff doesn't count because you can only get it by doing specific things, while XP comes from doing basically all things. I also like the idea of having options. Particularly, it means that VIPs can get Incarnate things out of it, allowing them to unlock Incarnate powers without being the Well's errand boy.

The only real problem with the Well is the way it dictates a character's motives. There are too many character concepts that just won't kowtow to another entity, ever, which are perfectly valid in the supers genre, and there is no other way to get the Incarnate powers. If I want to skip the Hollows because I've decided that my hero is cool with the Trolls, I can do that and still get to level 20. If I want to skip the iTrials because I've decided my Villain can't stand to have any other creature legitimately claim to be his master, I'm locked out of Incarnate powers.

Obviously there are some concepts that can't work just because you can't emulate everything, so the concepts that turn up less often in the relevant genre get neglected. You can't be a guy who goes on globe-hopping adventures because even if we had occasional door missions where the door was a helicopter that takes you to an ancient Tibetan monastery, that would still never be more than about 10% of the content. But for the iTrials? Just make the method of power acquisition more open-ended. If the Well were more vague, that'd work. If the Well were one option among several, that could also work.

DCUO has three origins, each with its own origin plotline for hero or villain side. If you're a metahuman hero, for example, you get a starting mission with the Flash to defeat Gorilla Grodd, while if you're a tech hero you get a Scarecrow mission from Batwoman, and a meta villain gets a Power Girl mission from Lex Luthor (even though Lex is obviously a tech guy, but whatever), and so on and so forth.

I hate it.

There are a grand total of three missions unique to each plotline, one at level one, another at level fifteen, and the last at level thirty (the level cap). It's just enough to make me feel like I'm missing out on some interesting content, but nowhere near enough to make me actually consider leveling from 1-30 just to see it, even if the extra character slots were completely free.

If Paragon Studios does decide to implement origin-based missions, please make sure to make them very, very big and involved. If there's something origin-based every five levels or so, it would make the content between magic blueside and natural blueside big enough that I would actually consider paying money to get an extra character slot to check it out. If there's any less than that, though, you can pretty much forget it.

Problem is, that's a lot of new content to make.

I like it. It's always kind of depressing to hit cap and realize the game's reward system has suddenly turned its back on you.

A few thoughts...

1) Don't add too many new areas. Having a beach area for the summer and a ski area for the winter and, I dunno, a corn maze or something for the fall, that would be a cool idea. Having three or four new areas stapled onto Pocket D would spread out the clubbers to the point where it would start to feel deserted a lot more often, though. Best to keep the crowds concentrated in a few areas, like they are now.

2) Do add some more things to do, however. Pocket D would be an excellent place to add in a few mini-games. There are a lot of times when I just want a quick break from standard MMO mob-bashing, and having a few mini-games (arrow key based DDR, mouse-based rail shooter, maybe some standard arcade games like a 2D top-down flier or a Space Invaders clone) in Pocket D would do really well, as well as giving me something to do at Pocket D besides just talk to people, something that often ends in disappointment when it turns out that literally everyone is just looking to hook up.

3) Definitely get some more music. A wide variety of different tracks that switch up every 10-15 minutes would be ideal.

There's also the fact that removing the timegate makes alignment tokens less valuable, which means a lot of people who might otherwise have bought them will just power through the tip missions instead. Why is it such a terrible thing when Paragon Studios tries to turn a profit? The whole game goes down if they don't.

The forums are no measure of community thoughts and feelings, because only a specific kind of player visits them. There isn't really any good measure of community thoughts and feelings except a mandatory random poll. The facts and evidence needed to argue about how the community feels about any given plot just don't exist.

That doesn't mean that a given piece of work can't be objectively bad, though. Murdering good ideas by overexposing them has a long and bloody history in comic books, but I think CoX could stand not to emulate it regardless. No one liked X3: Wolverine and Friends, nor was Origins too well received, and part of it is because Wolverine wasn't nearly as cool after two straight hours.

Remember: Too much of a good thing is an awesome thing. But too much of an awesome thing is...um...really, really dumb and bad.

As is quickly becoming standard, however, I reserve final judgment until after I've actually played through the endgame content.

Look, this game and its associated communities are old. Years old. Very well established. It's safe to say that server communities are not going to be changing for the foreseeable future. And some new players are going to enjoy the game much, much more on some servers than on others. I think it might do something for player retention to give the servers a brief description on the server selection screen. As an example, Freedom is densely populated, Virtue and Union are both far more RP-heavy than normal, Liberty and Triumph are friendly, Justice was the victim of an evil Australian conspiracy, and so on. I had the foresight to google around and find that Virtue would probably be the best fit for me, but not all players will, and in fact the only reason I had this foresight is because poor server choices have hurt my game experiences in the past.