SuperOz

Heh, myself and one other person got that reference....might want to find something more contemporary, as great as that show was.


Though more to the point of the thread: I am wondering how many people responding that they'd kill whomever are playing Vigilantes and would be okay with whatever consequences came from doing so. Let's face it...Wade, regardless of what happens to him, isn't Mr. Popular right now for killing off the big guy. It's interesting how rather than reforming/imprisoning/restraining someone who's done evil that killing someone would be seen as the best alternative.

Reminds me of that old argument about if you had the chance to kill Hitler as a baby, would you....I know I couldn't, even regardless. Because crossing that line into murder (especially that of a child, regardless of what evil they will go on and do) brings you to their level because you've made that choice that it's justifiable.


S.

Well, uh...bully for you? Until I can see some sort of breakdown of stats that supports your argument, I think my statement (which purports no real argument other than I think the game is doing well, and presumably is doing something well enough to get those numbers) stands nicely on its own.



S.

To be fair, I'm not telling you anything. What I am talking about is the 1% of the game that is played by the majority of people who do play this game, or are faced with it as a consequence of having a level fifty. It's an entirely relevant situation. All the tools built for teaming now come as a consequence of them being designed for Trials. I'm not trying to be facetious about it or even trivialise your point, but the situation as it stands has our game being built around and even sold on a teaming mechanic that as designed, is meant to provide from level one through level fifty and into the Trials. And your point was about how effectively the other game was in forming and retaining teams.

That's not me being selective or cherry-picking my argument, because as much as their game has been built on a companion/small number system, ours has been rebuilt around the LFG/Supersidekicking/Trial model. To go beyond that is going to get not only me, but the rest of this thread modsmacked, which we're skating along the edge of anyways, I think.


No, I do believe it needs to be fixed to some degree, but what I implictly disagree with are the assumptions behind it. Your entire argument for this is based around the notion that because the physical limitations of travel take an additional amount of time to physically put a party together to adventure, that this is an intentional and acceptable situation to the devs of the other game because they reasoned teaming was 'low on the totem pole' of things to work on.

If that's the case, then why was one of the first updates to that game a team-based scenario? That'd seem to fly in the face of that logic, that even knowing that'd it be problematic and difficult, they'd institute a system that would just frustrate people. And as you said, this is coming from a company with not only a reputation but an apparent knowledge of what player expectation would be.

The number of teaming incidents in that game occur that involve a necessity of teaming would be two or three times in a zone, as far as I can anecdotally tell. At the same time, there's absolutely no barrier that I can see to teaming in regular missions for the same. There's no lockout for someone new coming into a group, because missions can be shared. Even personal class missions can be shared with a simple check in the options menu. As Pebblebrook said, there's nothing stopping you from trying the designated group content on your own, but everything in the mission notes to even the labelling says 'Group', so beyond the travel reason you cite above, I have trouble seeing where the low prioritisation occurs.

The majority of play I've had in that other game has been with groups. And here's the thing: outside of this game...I can't think of too many others that have the overabundance of 'quick' gathering tools that this one has. And that's fine, there's a lot of tools that enable that, but I think as the Trial experience has shown, people found their own way to group when the tool appeared to be broken, and embraced that policy enough to continue with it when the tool was fixed.

The point I'm making there is that people will only see teaming as an issue if they percieve they're having one in the first place. And more directly to your point, there'll be a perception that the other game is a single-person MMO if their experience is one that seems to validate that claim.

And I'll reiterate: for me, it is most categorically not a single-person MMO experience. Nearly everything I've done I've done in groups, I've never once felt that it was overly difficult or overly time consuming to be in one or form one, and most importantly, I never felt impressed by a notion to think that I should be playing the game more on my own than with other people.

Pebblebrook's again right when they say that if you wanted to, you could just as easily turn CoH into a single-player experience, and I've had people argue to me in person that there's no reason to be in a group at all in this game because of the difficulty sliders that seem to reward you for doing so.

But as I said before, this isn't presenting as a problem to me and if it is to others, then I see a developer team responding in a positive and efficient manner. So I'm having trouble even seeing what precisely it is we're arguing over other than semantics.



S.

I think it is. If you're going to argue the relative merits of ease of teaming, you can't be selective in what areas those things occur. Ultimately both forms of teaming are about the act of socialisation and achieving a goal. The mechanics at their base are ultimately the same. As for whether this game was better at launch, I think that's an entirely subjective opinion. I certainly wasn't there for it, nor can I think of any articles that were particularly glowing in their reviews of it.


Maybe they don't, but you can't demonize them for it, either. I remember the Ustream from just a few weeks ago where Positron stated he was glad not to have the pressure of a licensed IP to work with, and I imagine Bioware was under enormous pressure to get this right in the face of the closure of the last game with the same theme.

But you said yourself earlier; these are your ideas of what you consider foundational MMO design. This doesn't mean they're universal or even necessarily going to be the ones fundamental to their success. I mentioned the subscriber numbers before; if they were such hurdles for people, this game would've folded in the first two weeks, let alone the first two months. I personally haven't been hindered in my ability to group, let alone add friends or communicate with them...

But again, we come back to crucifying a dev team for making errors. Does it matter whether you or I consider them fundamental? The point is that they're made. They decided that the features they pushed through to Live were important, and the subscriber base agreed in large numbers. Just because you personally take umbrage or issue with whether it's a fundamental design issue does not make it the single dominant factor in whether the game survives or falters.

I'm not going to get hung up on them, because it's done. The players (and presumably that includes both of us because we're both subscribing currently) are having faith in the developers these issues will be dealt with. I have no doubt they will be, and I'm unconcerned because in my personal experience, I'm not finding it game breaking nor so unpalatable it's coloring my viewpoint of the game generally. There is a lot a launching game can get wrong, and my view is they got a lot more right than they did wrong. And what they did get wrong is not so traumatic to me that I consider it bad decision making. Perhaps you do, and you're entitled to that viewpoint.

I'm simply just taking the longer view on this because I don't see the issues as insurmountable. And they have a track record I can take confidence in.



S.

Tough. :P Now, the door to another thread you can bother is that way. Off you go now, because I won't be responding to you again.



S.

I'll take that as a point of favor towards the game, rather than the probably derogatory that you intended. And by the way, thanks for cherrypicking your quotes....



S.

Well, again I have to disagree with you there. Just numerically speaking, it's going to be far easier for me to gather two or three friends (let alone just one if we both have companion NPC's) to get together and do missions together than it will be to gather eight or sixteen or whatever sometimes the very mandatory requirements this game asks for. And when those numbers are reached, you can control mob size and difficulty, but you can never change what occurs in a raid setting. But this is precisely one of the things this other game is going to do, and that's for the sake of ensuring everyone gets to see the content on a casual to hardcore scale.

Our game does not do that. Our game approaches raids particularly now with a set requirement (and dare I say expectation) of 'gear readyness'. There's no option for me to say 'okay, I don't want to charge around with twenty four people who might decide that they want to speed run this thing' at all. I either do it or opt out of the system (which is what I have done, because I've never found raiding fun). But on this other game, I have. And why? It's small, it's easy to pick up...it's mobile (I even took a transport to another section of the instance! It was great and broke up the 'quick, run here!' aspect of raids I often can't stand) and I felt totally engaged and never overwhelmed. That is a huge stride forward for casual gamers in my book and something CoH could stand to learn from.

Again, I think it's unfair to characterise the other game as having its design priorities wrong: CoH hasn't existed in a vacuum where the very same criticisms until what...only two years or so ago now?...were addressed. For the longest time, we couldn't instantly join our teammates for a mission. In fact, we suffered bugs where just zoning to try and do so would shut off the majority if not all of our abilities. A lot of what we call a great success with transporting to missions 'easily' hasn't existed until recently. Group teleporting was priorly a veterans' feature, and teleporting to a contact is less than six months old.

Alright, so they didn't get things right such as friending, communication and so on. But there's never been in my personal experience a completely smooth launch of any MMO. Yes, there's the 'in 2012, you should have these basics' argument, and that's not unfounded, but at the same time half the battle for any new game these days is to have a unique selling point that distinguishes it from the other. And the two things the other game does better than this one are its story and its voiced dialogue. Like it or not, people are in this day and age less inclined to read text and instead listen to voice, and that's largely through the advancement of technology we have. We're verbal creatures and we respond to it viscerally. I'm frankly surprised more games haven't taken to it, even though it's obviously expensive. But it works, and we know it works from console game design.

The other obvious factor here is the number of people playing. Yes, CoH has an enviable record of maintaining its base of around 120,000 people (or thereabouts) for the majority of its lifespan, but the other game is currently reporting 1.7 million players in its first two months. I can't attribute that solely to the license it represents; clearly that game is doing something right. And noone's going to be able to convince me the CoH devs wouldn't love even half those numbers.

This is where again I disagree with you saying they're gambling with not optimising what they don't have. I can't think of a company in recent times that within three months of launch invites its players for feedback and also then declare they weren't going to rush out their first game update. The other game's production house has a reputation for quality and perfection I have seen nowhere else in the industry; even casual talk about their prior games speak of a standard I frankly wish more would aspire to. That to me speaks of a dedication to perfection and a willingness to admit when they're wrong. Every transcript or article I've read in the last few days has surprised me with the dev team's accurate and honest assessment of where they went wrong. And that's a big call, given how much was sunk into the development of that game.

City also has a good reputation with largely straight-shooting with their playerbase, and I think that's largely a big reason why retention rates for this game are so good. They listen, they admit their mistakes (albeit sometimes grudgingly) and do their best to work cooperatively with the community to provide an experience everyone enjoys. I see the same with this other company, and I think we as game players can suffer from a sense of entitlement that suggests we should have all the things (to borrow from a meme) now. These things will come, as it took City so long to do, and especially after the lean years post-2006, when I first joined and saw the most amount of complaint and criticism levelled at this game (when Inventions were introduced, I thought there was going to be serious fallout from it if the forums were anything to go by). And I don't think I need to mention the missteps with PvP here.

I see far more positive potential in the other game than I do negatives, because I percieve a long-term and 'let's get it right' approach than I do leaning on design priorities. Again, it's unfair to compare what CoH decided to do to this other game; and while to some people's eyes that's what makes City of Heroes a unique and fun game, it's what makes it an uninteresting and unchallenging game to others (and I've heard that directly from real life friends of mine who played briefly). As I said before, it's apples and oranges, and I see their positive steps being ones that a heck of a lot of dev teams would balk at in their first year.

The final point I'd make is that City isn't our special snowflake of a game; I really think it's only been since the game was bought by NCSoft and we got Paragon Studios that the game came into its own and achieved some of the potential it had strived for from the beginning. What this game got right, it did through trial and error and not without its share of detractors (yourself included). I am just not going to punish the other game for what it doesn't have yet when there's such an obvious showing that there's intent and design to fix that. I'd cite the debacle that was the launch of a game set in another supehero city made by this game's former developer team as the model of what not to do if we were going to discuss it.



S.