konshu

Actually, he looked more to me like Harry Potter.

Thanks for the numbers!

My impression is that the game in its early conception was heavily influenced by Lovecraft; with the Circle, the Coralax, Rularuu, Shivans, the original Battalion, and so on. (In addition to other influences, of course.)

Now it's more of a Star Wars / Green Lantern / D&D scenario, with players charging up at the Well and acting as Guardians of the Well, probably eventually to become Wells themselves (Omega slot?).

And since i5 you can go to Croatoa and run Buck Salinger's arc to pick up the iron sword temp power.

But it's really not the same thing as a true magic sword attack power, is it?

Do the devs have contempt for fiction? Quite possibly so.

You have over 55,000 posts. I don't mind what you post, and I use the smiley icons a lot myself, but I think you qualify more than most as a "vocal minority."

Just sayin'.

As for the vast majority of players who don't put their voices on the forums ... when they see the game isn't living up to their expectations, they leave. The forums should have some dissenting voices to help the devs understand where their ship may be leaking.

IIRC, you were my first troll, Bill, back in 2005. Having been in the game for all of a month or so, and seeing all of the funky stuff that ought to be addressed, I made a few posts on the forums.

I called for a revamp of the search / team building GUI, and illustrated how it could be made more useful. I recommended replacing the useless origin icon with a colored dot that would indicate player status, and changing the default setting for players to "not looking for team" so they'd have to change it if they wanted to participate in the search-oriented team building system.

Years later, when it has become mostly irrelevant (the number of channels a player can subscribe to has been greatly expanded), the devs finally addressed this in some degree but maybe not in a very good way. I don't know, I don't use the search feature, but I've heard complaints.

I mentioned the need for a revamp of the content in the game. There was a problem where it was difficult for teams to share contact text, and the mission objectives were so generic it was difficult to get a sense of what the missions were about ("defeat villains in warehouse"). The clues we received were like fossils indicating development intended to go in different directions than what we received (Coralax hints, Magma Master hints, back in the Hollows). Interesting characters weren't developed (Greased Lightning, Electric Eel, Frostfire, etc.), groups were introduced and dropped (Hellions, Skulls), there were mysterious mob placements that weren't really explained (Family and Warriors in the Hollows, which aren't explained in the Hollows stories), and the Cavern of Transcendence story didn't really make sense (it looked like it was changed once or twice before publication). Outside of the Hollows we had all of these contacts that gave duplicate sets of missions. Why? Shouldn't there either be more sets of missions or fewer contacts? And we had contacts that I expected would give a type of story, but they instead gave something quite different. For example, the Atlas coroner, Mansfield, sent me off to fight the Circle and to recover an artifact that the Circle had stolen from a museum. Huh. And I'd picked him as a contact because I thought he'd send me on missions against the Vahzilok, because they were stealing bodies from the city morgues. (Yeah, that was early enough in my experience that I thought I might WANT to fight the Vahz. lol)

I commented that it would be relatively easy to assign 1-3 developers to go in and add some new content, fix it so that contacts and their arcs matched, explore some of the NPCs and fossilized trails, and repair the Cavern trial. The change in the search GUI I estimated would take about 20 minutes, but knowing how programming tasks often expand, I allowed that it might take as much as a day or two.

You responded in defense of the devs. You told me that I needed to cut them some slack. The game had just been introduced (well, out for a year), and they'd surely be aware of the shortcomings I mentioned and would get around to it. Just wait. It would be done before the year's end.

But they released CoV at the end of 2005, and they appended the level 40-50 content in 2006, and they added mayhems and safeguards and so on, and more or less never returned to the basic problems I outlined.

People complained in the forums about the limited number of mission maps, and I agreed that while it was a problem, I thought the devs could improve play by making better use of the game mechanics that were available to them. We are now finally seeing a partial degree of development in this area, mainly in content introduced over the last year. In 2005 I was asking for more chained objectives and narrative captions and so on, and five years later they have arrived in a fashion.

I also suggested the devs put forth a toolkit so that players could make their own content.

I wanted to turn the information terminals into a form of arena-like booking for task forces. (At the time if I wanted a task force I either had to form it, or leave my toon near the TF contact and just log in periodically to see if a team was forming.)

Anyway, the gears of the devs grind slowly and incompletely.

In the time since I first made these suggestions, the devs have introduced a variety of systems, but very little content aside from the expansions. They have not revamped the content. The early blue side content is still in disrepair. What they've done instead is they've revised the leveling curve so players spend almost no time at the early levels (which to me is a sad solution), and new players are expected to play the Praetorian content which is so different in theme and structure from the rest of the game it is like a completely different game. AE is no solution either, because the devs borked the search function and upset themselves so much over their own design flaws that they don't want to revisit the feature any more.

So here it is, 2011, and the problems I cited in 2005 are largely still present and what the devs have done in response hasn't been adequate.

My first impressions of the game still stand. I still say the devs could do their game a world of good by hiring a small team of 1-3 developers to revise / create new content for the game, renewing the canon. I think they've covered the whole powers / systems thing fairly adequately (yes, there's room for more proliferation, but really, there's a lot in the game right now). Content does have an appeal that should not be dismissed. I know game designers must look at Ms Pac-Man and Frogger and express a belief that reward systems are more important than content, but I'd point to the book, film, and television industries to illustrate the enduring success of content, and storytelling has its own system of rewards. A game can have both.

One last shot, for now, at the devs: for some years now, I have been calling "The Coming Storm" the "Nevercoming Storm." I expect to be able to continue doing this for a long time.