Second Measure

Happy anniversary, everyone! After seven years of live service, City of Heroes remains the most successful super-powered MMO of all time, and that’s thanks to you, the great people who have played the game these many years. We here at Paragon Studios have planned a whole month of celebrations for you, including in-game events, community participation, and even some special deals in the store.

Some of our most experienced players will recall that in the early days, City of Heroes was a very different game. The leveling curve was quite steep, missions used the longest maps whenever possible, the Monorail and Ferry required you to traverse long distances between multiple lines, and contacts regularly sent you to a different zone for every mission and were very private about their cell phone numbers. Some of the earliest Task Forces and Strike Forces were quite long as well, and I know I spent many a weekend on Trials that required a significant amount of dedication to complete.

We have changed many of these things over the last few years, sometimes by reworking existing content, other times by approaching new content differently. “Live” is an appropriate term for an MMO, since it really does feel alive -- always changing and evolving. Our goals have shifted more and more to make the game more accessible and friendly to your lifestyle. We want our more casual players to be able to engage in all of the action, as well as provide a wealth of options for our hardcore players to explore.

It is important to learn from the past -- it got us here and we are thankful for the successes we’ve had, as well as some of the things we learned from that weren’t so successful. We want to build on that history and we are focused on the future of the game: we know we have many great years ahead of us. Being able to constantly improve and expand upon the game is truly one of the most rewarding things to experience as a developer, and we always want that to show in our passion for City of Heroes.

We view City of Heroes is as a storytelling medium. We have a lot of long-term plans for the main story, and all of these plans are intended to provide a backdrop for the stories you tell with your characters every day. The Incarnate storyline weaves into the Freedom Phalanx, Arachnos, and the Praetorian storyline, and they all lead to the “Coming Storm” we have been hinting at for a some time now. The Well of the Furies, the Menders, the Letter Writer – all of these entities have their own agendas, and their motives are currently unclear, but that will change and threads of these tales will be more tightly wound. The next year in particular already bears some true surprises, and your characters will become more important all the time.

Related to this, the Incarnate System is an important part of our plans, and in May we will be going into closed beta with the next Incarnate Trial: Keyes Island Anti-Matter Reactor. As I have noted before, we will add Incarnate Trials with every issue, but this year we will roll out even more Incarnate Trials to build a solid foundation for the future. We will also expand the Incarnate Abilities periodically, though not necessarily as often as we add Incarnate Trials. This includes adding more abilities to any individual slot as well as growing up the tree -– one of the great things about the Incarnate System is that you can swap between multiple abilities for any Incarnate slot, and we want to give you more choices to use in more situations: there won’t always be a single “best” choice when it comes to an Incarnate Ability. We will also introduce whole new Incarnate Trees in the distant future to broaden your choices.

We know that there are players who are looking for alternative ways to experience the Incarnate System, especially options that are more accessible to solo players and small groups. We are looking into this for a future issue, and we want it to be added in a meaningful way that augments the epic Incarnate storyline and still remains accessible to our more casual players. Group-oriented play remains an important part of the CoH experience but we understand that not everyone likes to play in a group, and we will endeavor to take this into consideration in future development decisions.

Additionally we will introduce content that is not directly Incarnate-related; we will wrap up some old plotlines and expand on others. In the next Issue (21), we will be featuring an entire new zone with lots of things to do, both solo and in a group. We aren’t abandoning the independent spirit many of our players have. The zone will not only have new story arcs and contacts, but a very unique zone event that significantly links it to the greater storyline of the world.

We are very much looking forward to this month of celebrations, and future celebrations as well. Thanks for your ongoing loyalty, for your honest feedback over the years, and the great times we all get to share with you.

Several of us had the good fortune recently to partake of an all-expenses-paid luxury excursion to PAX East in Boston (just call us the Jet Set). We had a fantastic time meeting players at the meet and greet on Friday night, and of course the Panel on Saturday morning is always a lot of fun for us. Unfortunately, Matt “Positron” Miller was ill Saturday morning and none of us rolled Emp Defender, so Matt had to sit out the panel. (Matt thanks everyone for their well-wishes and of course for attending the panel, even though he wasn’t able to make it).

Food poisoning aside, we had a great time at our PAX East panel. When we arrived we were greeted with an excited and eager line of fans raring to get in (check out this pic from CoH player @ransim - http://twitpic.com/48t87i ). It was great to see everyone positive and excited about what we were presenting, and there was in particular a lot of cheering and applause over the announcement of the upcoming Global Server List. It’s no surprise that this announcement was extremely well received, as a Global Server List has been a common request for quite a while now, and recent consolidation of our server operations has finally made this possible. This also opens the potential for additional database optimizations in the future, which will benefit everyone in the long run.

Because the European players are very important to us, we wanted to provide you with an even larger pool of players to give your community the opportunity to grow and the chance to make new friends from across the globe. We’re anticipating that a number of people will stop in to say hello (and, of course, make some characters in the new slots available). I know I’m looking forward to having a chance to practice my laughably rusty French.

We know that your online and in-game identities are important. City of Heroes is at its heart a game about who you are, not just what you do. We’ve all spent the last 7 years forming friendships, alliances, and rivalries in City of Heroes, and we know that anything that can impact your in-game identity can be a reason for concern. At the same time, to make this server list change happen, we need to ensure your identity remains unique from other players. We did a lot of data mining and found that pre-pending the names of EU accounts affected the fewest active players (the difference is hundreds vs thousands).

We want the process by which this happens to be very clear for everyone. We considered a number of solutions to the identity collision challenges presented by Global Server Access, and many of these options were quite complex and potentially confusing. Because we have to communicate the process to a number of players in multiple languages, and make it clear enough so everyone knows exactly what to expect, we chose the most direct route we could while disrupting the fewest players. At the same time, a more widespread solution such as pre-pending every European player’s global name, even if there was no collision, may have been clearer, but was too intrusive. To be clear, this solution affects no character names and affects a very small number of players’ account and global names.

Complex solutions introduce risk, as well, and we want to increase the chances that the necessary disruption to your play experience will happen one time, and not be drawn out or risk your game data.

I know the feeling of seeing someone else with your name. A year ago I transferred my original main character from Victory to Virtue. I lost the character name matching my global name in the transfer. A few months ago, I happened to log into Atlas Park standing next to the character who had my old name (what are the odds?). He actually offered to give up the character name when I mentioned it to him, but I didn’t want to do that to someone else.

We have been listening to your feedback carefully here at Paragon Studios, and Zwillinger, Avatea, and Beastyle have done a fantastic job of representing your concerns. We loved the suggestion to let people reactivate old accounts to reduce the number of shared names between regions. We’ll definitely make that happen for you shortly before we change over to the Global Server List.

In the meantime, we are very excited about Issue 20 launching next week! The Incarnate System has been a long time in development, and we know it brings some new depth to your long-established characters. In the interest of helping you set up your characters right to take advantage of the Incarnate powers--and tune a build for the Incarnate Trials--we will be offering a free respec with the issue launch. We will also be giving you a free repsec with the Anniversary celebrations at the end of April, as well, so no need to hoard it, either!

My thanks, I'm fortunate to get to work at a place that has great things to write about, and great people to write it to.

Happy February, everyone! I wanted to take some time with this month’s Producer’s Letter to cover the upcoming Incarnate System launching with Issue 20 and address some of your feedback from the last Producer’s Letter. Now that we are approaching our seventh anniversary, the Incarnate System introduces a true “end game” to City of Heroes and Villains, and we are proud of how it has come together. For those who may have missed some of the buzz, the Incarnate System is made up of Incarnate Trials and the Incarnate Abilities, which combine to help you ascend to levels of might previously only reached by characters such as Statesman and Lord Recluse.

Evolution of the End Game
When I started at Paragon Studios, my first day began with a meeting about the Incarnate Abilities, and my second day ended with a playtest of what will now be one of our first two Incarnate Trials, Lambda Sector. Since then we have been developing and testing these events and the underlying technology that will make them possible.

Incarnate Trials are not Task Forces and Strike Forces with a different name, they are an opportunity for players to come together in a new way to team up as they ascend to power and overcome tremendous challenges. The Trials are built on evolutionary tech and design philosophies that have influenced the last few issues and which come together as the foundation of the Incarnate System. I doubt any complex feature we add to City of... will be the perfect fit for every single player’s preference (even a feature as straightforward as Day Jobs had its detractors), but every player with a level 50 character and who has Going Rogue can get into this endgame and profit by it if they so choose. We’ve made it accessible, challenging, and rewarding. You’ll feel powerful when you defeat these encounters and you’ll feel powerful using the Incarnate Abilities.

Accessible
Incarnate Trials are designed for players who don’t have hours every night to run content. All of the Incarnate Trials are meant to be completed in 30 minutes to an hour and a half. This will let you play them more often--or on more characters--and still have time to socialize, craft, apprehend miscreants, plan diabolically, and all the other great things you’ve been able to do for the past seven years. You don’t need a big group to play the Trials—the first two Incarnate Trials only require 8 players (Lambda Sector) or 12 players (Behavioral Adjustment Facility)—but you can also play them with up to double those numbers of players, each. The Incarnate Trials aren’t balanced for a particular alchemy of players—you don’t need exactly two tanks and three controllers and one stalker and etc. etc. etc.—you just need a big enough group with a variety of abilities.

About those groups, you don’t need to pre-assemble a team to get in. We’ve added new functionality to the LFG window to let you get directly into the Incarnate Trials without creating a group first. We call this the Turnstile around the studio, and all you need to do is open your LFG window, choose an Incarnate Trial, and join the queue. You can join the Turnstile with a team or join individually, and you will be placed in a queue with everyone else looking to participate in the same Incarnate Trial. Once the queue on your server is full enough—no matter how long it takes to get together 8 to 12 players—you will be teleported to the Trial by forces beyond mortal ken (i.e. the server). You don’t need to be in the most dedicated, largest Super Group on the server or have a friends list for your friends list’s friends list. Heck, you don’t even need to know anyone on the server. You just have to click a button. And while you wait you can craft, run costume contests, street sweep, go to the tailor, spend time at the Auction House, etc., anywhere in the world; of course you can always drop out of the queue if you want and rejoin at any time. (Once you join a Task or Strike Force or enter a mission map, you will leave the queue, however.)

In addition to the Turnstile, we have also added something we are calling “Leagues.” A League is a team of teams—up to six teams in a League, for a total of forty-eight players, and everyone in the Incarnate Trial is automatically added to the League for the duration of the Trial. There is a new UI to help track all these people, and you can do things like choose certain people to focus on--to watch them in a separate pane--so you can keep track of the health of the Tanks and Brutes, for example. We’re pretty excited about this, and in the coming months we will reveal some more details on how you can use Leagues for things like Hamidon fights as well.

Challenging
We want to keep these Incarnate Trials short, but that doesn’t mean we want them to be just “punch punch punch profit.” We want to give you new things to do. The BAF starts with a good ol’ fist fight with great big robots to get you warmed up, but then it becomes a mad dash in the dark to prevent prisoners from escaping, then some more fights using push-pull mechanics to get the job done, followed by a different kind of boss fight at the end that will require people to be on the ball a little more than usual. Lambda Sector has some of its own shenanigans, as well. As Positron has been saying, we want to give you reasons to use powers you haven’t clicked on in a while. But we also don’t want to change the foundation gameplay of City of Heroes, which is all about having a rousing good fight without being passed over for the group because you aren’t an exact archetype and powerset, so the Incarnate Trials will keep the challenge appropriate to your group and your foes won’t have specific weaknesses you have to account for with specific character abilities.

Rewarding
We also want you to feel rewarded for participation, and want everyone to have an equal chance at getting a reward, whether you are healing or buffing or debuffing or using pointy things to make moving things fall down. We also don’t want to heavily reward people who don’t contribute to the team effort. So when you help your team, you will get the good stuff. The more you help, the cooler the stuff will be, and/or the faster you will climb the Incarnate Abilities tree. But we also know everyone has a different level of investment, and persistence will pay off in the long run.

Powerful
We want you to feel powerful in City of Heroes. Does that mean you will beat every Incarnate Trial on the first attempt? Even the mightiest characters in comic book lore have to suffer a few setbacks every now and again to demonstrate that the stakes are high, and the stakes are really high in the Incarnate Trials. You will need to experience the fights a few times to get a handle on the mechanics and figure out the best powers and the best strategies. But once you triumph, you will realize you had the power the whole time to defeat some of the most challenging content ever in City of Heroes.

Part of the power you experience will be in the Incarnate Abilities. You’ll be able to do some truly impressive things to help you and your team, and we have gone to the next level with the visual and audio effects for many abilities, as well as their effect in the game. As you wield higher and higher levels of power, you should stand out in a crowd. Incarnacy may be its own reward, but it’s nice to make a big impression, too. (Note that I only say “Incarnacy” because it bugs Positron when I do.) Eventually, once we release all of the Incarnate Slots, you’ll even be a little overpowered for the first waves of Incarnate Trials, and by then, we’ll have something much more challenging for you to do with your newfound power. (Evil chuckle redacted.)

About That Accessibility Thing
For our more casual players, we have added an option for you to continue to build your way up the Incarnate Tree by collecting Incarnate Shards without doing any Incarnate Trials--you will even get Incarnate Shards when you are exemplared down. It will take longer than it will take by participating in Incarnate Trials, and you’ll miss out on some epic storylines, but you will be able to claim your seat at the Incarnate table nevertheless.

The End Game, not the End of the Game
We’re hard at work polishing up everything that makes up Issue 20, and we’re excited for you to see some of the other great features, as well. For the long term, the Incarnate Trials will be part of every Issue release, and the Incarnate Abilities will be expanded from time to time as well. As I said last month, we love you, man, and we will continue to provide lots of great content with every issue just as we always have: we are already hard at work on other great missions, enemies, and powers for the future. We are committed to creating more and more reasons for you to both create new characters as well as keep your established characters fighting the good fight (or the evil fight, as the case may be). And we are about to give you a preview of one of the Incarnate Trials: you’ll be able to experience the Behavioral Adjustment Facility, the Turnstile, and Leagues. Keep your eyes peeled for a Very Special Announcement.

Greetings comma salutations comma

I wanted to take a moment to reintroduce Tim “Black Scorpion” Sweeney and ask him to give some more details on the upcoming Strike Pack release in early February. Black Scorpion has been working closely with Positron on the Incarnate System over the last year as well as leading up some of the other features you will be seeing in Issue 20, but in particular he is responsible for the features of the Strike Pack. Now if only he’d fix the hydraulics system in that power armor, these carpets don’t clean themselves!

Greetings comma salutations comma

I wanted to take a moment to reintroduce Tim “Black Scorpion” Sweeney and ask him to give some more details on the upcoming Strike Pack release in early February. Black Scorpion has been working closely with Positron on the Incarnate System over the last year as well as leading up some of the other features you will be seeing in Issue 20, but in particular he is responsible for the features of the Strike Pack. Now if only he’d fix the hydraulics system in that power armor, these carpets don’t clean themselves!

I love Katana/Ninja Blade, the speed of the set is a big plus, but the animations are very cool. I also love my Fire/Storm Controller, she looks awesome in action, and I had wanted fire imps since my first day in the game. Dual Blades is one of my favorites visually, as well, and lately I have been really having fun with an Energy Melee Tanker--something about the glowing fists makes the face punching extra face-punchy.

Actually, I'm just incredibly busy. Positron says my red name should have been "Double Booked".

Thanks, Jesse! I'm proud to fill your shoes and lead the charge into 2011 and beyond. Without further ado, here is my first Producer's letter:


2011 is upon us and at Paragon Studios we can’t be more excited about what we’re working on; I’d love to tell you all of the amazing stuff we have coming up, but I wouldn’t want to spoil all the surprises. Suffice it to say that this is some of the best content we have yet put into the game. I am looking forward to using these Producer Letters to give you a sense of where we are and where we are going--as a team and as a game, for this year and beyond.

Unparalleled Content: Over the past couple of years, we have really challenged ourselves at Paragon Studios to develop better and better content. We want to give everyone the chance to try new things and use their powers in new ways. We want you to see the game world and your character from new dramatic angles. With the upcoming Incarnate Trials, you’re going to be able to take your characters to power levels undreamt (Power! I tell you! muahahaha) and really see some of the most exciting gameplay we’ve ever been able to create. We’ve also dramatically improved the art, with some of the best animations, effects, audio, characters, and environments we’ve ever produced; early this year, we’re going to be giving you a pretty “wild” new look, and later this year we’ll turn up the pressure.

The Future Is Now: The features we have brought you in the game over the last year are just the first steps on a voyage to bigger, better, shinier, much more exciting things in 2011 and beyond. Going Rogue set up the world of Praetoria. Issue 19 introduced the Incarnate system and some of our most challenging content to date. Issue 20 will unleash the Incarnate Trials that bring you even more raw power courtesy of the next levels of Incarnate abilities. Issue 21 will continue to develop these storylines and features in new and thrilling ways. All the great things we are producing take you steps, leaps, and superleaps closer to the resolution of an epic storyline, and we want your characters to help lead that journey.

End Game for All: We have always wanted to provide a game that was open to everyone. We want you to feel powerful when you visit our world, and the Incarnate Trials will be inclusive, accessible, and easy to participate in. Not to say that it isn’t some of the most challenging and exciting content we have ever provided, but we want to make it possible for you to participate in easily, without the need to belong to an elitist “raiding guild” and without surrendering your weekends for a small chance at rolling on a random reward. Now that many of you have begun your ascension to Incarnate, we’ll be releasing the Rare and Very Rare tiers of the Alpha Slot in just a few short weeks to help you get a leg up on the launch of Issue 20.

Service with a Smile: In recent years we’ve worked hard to not just give you all ever-more-engaging content, but also to continue to improve everyone’s overall experience playing City of Heroes and Villains. Often this comes from updating old content but also in improvements to the way you interact with the game. For example, we are currently working to integrate City of Heroes into the NCsoft Launcher, which will bring with it a significant improvement to the process of downloading and updating the game for all NA and EU (Mac and PC) customers. One of the immediate benefits is that all of our customers will finally benefit from the same launcher and the most up-to-date information; this is the first step in bringing our communities together.

We Love You, Man: I want to make it clear that you, the players, are the most important aspect of City Of…, and we want you guys to know this. I am committed to giving you insight into where we are going, what we are doing, and how AWESOME it’s going to be (to steal a favorite word from War Witch). With the pure ambition of Issues 18, 19, 20, and 21, I know we’ve been focused on development and a little quieter than usual on the forums, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been listening. We want you to have an active voice in where we are going--you wanted the Incarnate System to be more epic, and thus was Issue 19 born. You wanted more info on the Praetorian incarnation of Hamidon, and we’ll be giving you more, starting at PAX East this year.

No, I Mean It: As the development team’s New Year’s Resolution, we are going to be even more active with all of you through the forums, Facebook, dev diaries, and Q&As about the Incarnate Trials, Lore, and all the great features we have in development. You’ll see more interaction with the old hands like Dark Watcher and The Television, as well as from some of the fantastic new talent you may not have met yet. We’ll also be bringing you some rewards for your continued loyalty, like Double XP “Weekend” from January 27-31, and keep your eyes peeled for an announcement next week on plans for our seventh anniversary this spring.

Thanks for your continued support, your continued participation, and for being the best gaming community in this dimension. As a long-time player of City of Heroes before I joined Paragon, I know how fantastic the people are who play this game. I want to use these producer’s letters to stay in touch with you, so please feel free to respond with topics you’d like for me to address in the future.

Edit: Now with 100% more images I stole from Black pebble.