I didn't appreciate CoX's innovations until ...
By
AlexEss,
Posted on: 2007-12-26 09:19 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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Whats left?
Doing the same kind of missions again and again?
Standing around in Atlas Park for a few hours?
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Why not?
Just because you're hell bent on perpetually chasing carrots, doesn't mean the rest of the world is. 
Outstanding original post. All the things mentioned are basically the reason that, despite many of my real-life friends jumping onto the WoW bandwagon, I never could get into it and stuck with CoX instead. Sidekicking especially is something I just can't live without, now that I've played a game that does it right.
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Doing the same kind of missions again and again?
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As a matter of fact, thanks to Auroboros, I'm finally able to play through old story arcs I missed when the game first launched, and add more souvenirs to my collection. Back then, I didn't fully understand the benefits of actually doing missions, and spent my first 20 levels street-sweeping with my old SG. It wasn't until my early 20's that I realized how rewarding missions were, not only in terms of xp bonuses, but actually getting involved in some pretty cool story arcs and adding context to the game world.
On a related note, I finally earned the War Wall badge, shortly after Auroboros went live. I also learned there's a lot of back story to this game that I haven't been through yet - even post level 20 - and I'm quite looking forward to experiencing all of it, right after I finish Dark Watcher's story arc in the RWZ.
Just the other day, I ran Officer Wincott's story arc, 5 times, just to acquire all of the one-time and lvl 1-14 Flashback badges. I'm just 4 badges away from 400 now.
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Standing around in Atlas Park for a few hours? What is there?
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I often log in for up to an hour and just stand around in AP. While there, I usually keep an eye on my server's raid and badge channels for opportunities to get in on some action. Sometimes I'll offer to help a newbie team with the occasional sewer run, or just hang out with other players, feeling quite proud of the fact that I don't have to level up anymore. I've also been known to give out influence to anyone who asks - my standard hand-out is 50k.
More than anything, I just enjoy feeling Heroic. Like one of my badge titles reads, I just love being a Hero of the City.
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I'm not sure you read those two posts.
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I read one that extolled the virtues of non-instanced content and a reply that complained about waiting in line for l337 gear drops, and then noted that isn't how this game works.
Is that what happened, or did I miss something.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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I'm not sure you read those two posts.
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I read one that extolled the virtues of non-instanced content and a reply that complained about waiting in line for l337 gear drops, and then noted that isn't how this game works.
Is that what happened, or did I miss something.
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He was complaining about waiting in line for l337 gear drops *in games whose no-instanced-missions content was being extolled*. In other words, the "complaint" was just a jab at the competition 
Even if Castle enjoys resource contention that also makes him want to slap people, plenty of us don't enjoy being made angry. It's good that at least one game doesn't give us that incentive to irritate our fellow players.
Don't take the Global chat for granted, either. I remember how long it seemed waiting for that feature. How it was supposed to come out with (was it issue 3? or 4?) but wasn't ready yet. How for months, maybe a year, I begged for Global Chat
It was a brilliant, wonderful day for CoH when global chat finally came live. Even though it's been one of the buggiest features of the game, it's been a huge win, its sizable drawbacks compensated for by its enormous benefits.
Sidekicking - good; I was not surprised EQ2 picked up on it (and yes their mentoring is a good feature of that game), I was surprised more games don't feature it though. Maybe in the future more will.
The rest of the above is all true. I played Everquest. Friends camped things. One friend camped one thing for something like 40 hours straight - no sleep. He had to, in his mind, there was no other way to get some special item for his 'epic' quest.
I never did that. So you did not "have" to. But the game was such that most people seemed to cave in to the pressure or quit the game. There were all kinds of ways that the mechanics of Everquest encouraged people to be the worst of human nature. It was like a course in game theory where you really are the Prisoner facing his Dilemma, except betraying is a winning strategy... and I don't mean in a role playing way, I mean as people, to the other players of the game, including the ones they've befriended.
Even CoV encourages players as people to do the right thing, even if their characters are doing mischief and mayhem.
A fabulous post InfamousBrad!
/e golf clap
I have to say that I absolutely love the fact that CoX has mostly instanced missions and how they are set up. The only other MMO I play is LOTRO, and I got to tell you, camping spawns for a loot drop is not fun, not to mention loot ninjas, and kill stealers.
Things are much, much better in CoX. Our loot system is superior. You don't have to actually "loot" a body and everyone has a chance of getting something, not just the person who initially tags the mob.
Uber Talgrim - level 50 emp/dark defender
Uber Rod - level 50 dark melee/regen scrapper
Rod Valdr - level 50 invuln/SS tanker
Talgrim - level 50 ninja/dark mastermind
OMG!! Please add these costume designs now!
I am just gonna Quote a part Daikon's very apt post from earlier on this thread because its so bloody true its not even funny.
"It's piss poor to see new MMO's come out that haven't learned the lessons that this game was built on.
Daikon"
Zen.
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Doing the same kind of missions again and again?
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A number of us out here have a favorite task force or trial that we don't mind running yet again; the hero-side respec trial happens to be one of mine, for example.
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Standing around in Atlas Park for a few hours?
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MMORPGs are, to one degree or another, over-glorified chat rooms. In fact, there are now chat programs that feature 3D customizable avatars and a virtual environment of some kind and were likely inspired by MMORPGs.
-Kirov
"To be violent at first and wind up fearing one's people is the epitome of ineptitude."
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War
There are really 4 things that any developer of any other game should look at CoX for as inspirations for their own games.
Global Chat, which is a great feature. Sidekick/Exemp'ing, I know some other games are incoprorating it, but it is done quite well here. The LFG Tool here is quite good and is something that is oddly lacking from other games I have played. WoW did add one eventually but too late in the game's life cycle for it to really become a major tool for most players. Lastly Badges. The badge system here was handled realy well with the overwhelming number and variety of badges and the awards associated with them. If I recall the badge system was Posi's baby and he really deserves mad props for it.
Many other things mentioned in the thread I have seen elsewhere or done better in other games including balance between world and instanced content, progression, loot, social tools, etc. The gameplay itself isn't especially innovative but it serves the purpose it was created for well.
Other things such as class/power balance, combat mechanics, etc are really low points in my opinion and something I really hope the devs take some hard looks at for major overhauls if they ever do a CoX 2.
As with any game you take the good with the bad and if in the end you are having fun, its a winner.
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I'm not sure you read those two posts.
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I read one that extolled the virtues of non-instanced content and a reply that complained about waiting in line for l337 gear drops, and then noted that isn't how this game works.
Is that what happened, or did I miss something.
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I was saying that non-instanced content is often very casual player unfriendly. CoH/V uses a lot of instanced content which helps make it very friendly for players who don't have time for Shadowhunter to respawn again so that they can kill him and take his helmet back to the contact so they can complete their quest.
And from an earlier post: kill-stealing. In CoH/V, is someone steals your kill when out street sweeping, you'll probably just look at them and wonder what their problem is. In other MMOs, when someone kills your obvious target and gets all the xp and the loot drops, you want them dead.
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So during this last week of the year, let me take a break from my (honestly, increasingly bitter) arguments about some of the things I hate in this game, especially since issue 11, to thank the City of Heroes/City of Villains development team for a long list of things that they did right that are so, so much more creative and innovative, so much more ground breaking, than I ever gave them credit for.
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Good post. I've often complained about a variety of things in this game as well. I just always figured that the fact that I've stuck around this game for so long whereas other MMOs have only gotten a few months at most from me made it apparent that I think they've done a bang-up job on this game overall.
Goodbye may seem forever
Farewell is like the end
But in my heart's the memory
And there you'll always be
-- The Fox and the Hound
Excellent thoughts. Virtually everything you said are all of the reasons I am here and will be here until they kick me out!
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Darkfall is looking at not only breaking the mold, they're talking about SHATTERING it into it's sub-atomic components
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I looked up Darkfall on Wiki and saw this.
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Darkfall is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) in development by Aventurine SA that combines real-time action and strategy in a fantasy setting. Expected to feature unrestricted pvp, complete looting, and a player skill dependent combat system, Darkfall is highly anticipated by the player versus player (PvP) community.
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What is so mold-breaking there?
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What is so mold-breaking there?
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Dark & Light failed.
Vanguard failed.
Third time's the charm?
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What is so mold-breaking there?
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Dark & Light failed.
Vanguard failed.
Third time's the charm?
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I'm going to create a new MMO and call it, "Same [censored], Different Game". That way, my marketing hype will be frank and honest right out of the gate.
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Very nice post, Brad. Thanks a ton!
I've played a ton of MMOs. I've yet to play one I couldn't take some ideas from. I think you short change the concept of street sweeping in other games a bit -- if all you do is instance missions, an MMO can begin to feel awfully empty and lonely! I like seeing other player wander by doing whatever it is they are doing while I'm gathering the whatsits for my collection quest. I even like competing for resource nodes despite the fact that it often makes me want to slap my fellow players. I definitely get where you are coming from; but I do think there is room for this style of play.
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Actually I say too much instancing is City of Heroes/Villains weakness. I completely agree with you Castle. I miss street sweeping and seeing other players. Sometimes it feels like Diablo II where the "world" is just a visual representation of a chat room and then you "login" to the game either by yourself or up to 7 others.
Since I come from old school MMORPGs (Ultima Online, Everquest up until Planes of Power), I always liked competition and the feeling of a shared world. I even dislike having instances in World of Warcraft.
I liked how in Everquest you had dungeons that were camped. It gave them life in my personal opinion. I also like the outdoor world of Everquest/World of Warcraft (See: Non - Instanced) since you can run into other people and interact.
I wouldn't mind if the developers (If it is even possible with this engine) to somehow create a co-op zone where there is no instance missions. All of the content and story arcs take place in the "real" zone. There could be certain spawns and NPCs you might have to hunt. (Destroy the Nemesis Horse Automation) Yes it would be similar to World of Warcraft but there should be a balance.
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I started EQ after Velious came out and before Luclin. I was there when Gates of Discord came out and left before Omens of War. I'll agree that I like having people around, but, I dislike having to compete for the drops from named things...that may or may not drop. Also, there were so many ways for someone who wanted to be annoying to annoy you with no real way of getting away from them, short of giving up on what you wanted to accomplish and finding something else to do.
If you didn't mind the kill stealers and trains, then, I wonder what class you were? Or played the most. Some classes had a bit of an easier time on certain things. For instance, a train doesn't matter quite as much if you can feign death or go invisible, and kill stealers didn't matter if you were sure you could outdamage them.
Also, the worst of the guild blocking that I heard of came in with Planes of Power. There were guilds that were deliberately sabotaging other guilds from getting the keys to zones. If getting the keys had been more instanced perhaps? But, perhaps keeping the content more "exclusive" was what EQ wanted. It fits the design of not enough loot to go around for all the people required to succeed at a raid.=P
I suspect that CoH/CoV could handle a zone without instances fairly well. You will still have a few problems, as some people who have hunted the monsters in the different zones might tell you. In Croatoa, Sally is not instanced, nor is Jack or Eochai. The Paladin in Kings sometimes inspires a zonewide hunt...and then sometimes there are three of him in one spot.
That's actually kind of fun, if you can get a group together for that.
Which is usually where global channels and the global friend list come into play. If one or two of the people who see a monster up call it out in a channel, then you have a hunt. Using broadcast doesn't always produce enough interested folk.
Shae Firewarder
Good list. Some of the things have been noticed and emulated in other MMOs, the Exemplar/SK being a notable example. And I think at the time, the team member search function wsa head-and-shoulders above the pack. (Nowadays it's a bit outdated, and sorely needs a "leader LFM" flag system.)
A lot of it can be summed up as "not wasting players time." In so many other games, it's standard logic that if you can make players move more slowly, the content will last longer. And it's true, and it works against CoH. Some people find that it becomes "routine" more quickly here, to which I point out that's because in a given hour they complete 5 missions and beat 300 enemies, vs (at most) 1/30 in any other game.
And the scaling, I don't know why others don't adapt to that more. I was talking to a designer from another company just yesterday, and he was still stuck on the "this mission has exactly these enemies at exactly this level" mindset. Just because that's how it's done.
One thing I'd like to add on is the intelligence of the respawn logic here. It's made easier by the use of instances, but still didn't have to be done this way. They go out of a way to make sure that an enemy will (usually) not appear out of thin air, not spawn on top of you.
I hate that in other games, where I walk into an empty field, think I'm fine, and suddenly enemies are appearing out of nowhere and aggroing on me. Because as it turns out, someone went through and cleared them all 9 minutes ago. It's immersion-breaking and it's annoying and I couldn't stand it.
Here, even ambushes come running from around a corner. You may leave a spot, come back and find it repopulated, but for the most part it's always behind your back in a way that could be believed.
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Darkfall is looking at not only breaking the mold, they're talking about SHATTERING it into it's sub-atomic components
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I looked up Darkfall on Wiki and saw this.
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Darkfall is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) in development by Aventurine SA that combines real-time action and strategy in a fantasy setting. Expected to feature unrestricted pvp, complete looting, and a player skill dependent combat system, Darkfall is highly anticipated by the player versus player (PvP) community.
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What is so mold-breaking there?
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Well, I suppose if they produced controllers similar to the Wiimote, and made players actually learn how to throw a blow with a sword or block with a shield... but then all the SCA people would rule the game through having an experience pool several decades deep to pull from... I wonder how complicated the sensor would have be to be able to correctly identify the motion in a Bellatrix snap... Probably price the thing out of the market.
"But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses."
-- Bruce Leverett, Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers
I'm still completely shocked other games don't let you sidekick. It's a great inovation! I mean, how many times in this form have you seen anyone wanting the sidekick feature dumped??
Another thing to add, though... the lack of flat out time sinks. Most other MMOs make you do outright DUMB stuff, sometimes for hours! They are a lot more like work than play. Crafting systems can be the worst. Hunting thousands of enemies way below your level to get enough crafting parts to make something IS NOT FUN. Clicking the same buttons over and over and over (and, in Dark Age of Camelot's cae, waiting for a progress bar) for hours on end IS NOT FUN. And so on and so forth. If people are watching TV while they "play" then that's a sign they are not playing, they are working.
Here, there are few dumb time sinks. Some badges can turn into terrible grinds but very few of those give you anything more than a badge saying you fought your way through a terrible grind. Even the age old time sink of running back and forth over zones is made a lot more fun with travel powers like Superjump, and lately you've been cutting the time sink out all together with base teleports and Ouroborus.
The big problem with all this is, of course, that it's hard to do other MMOs. Hey, that new MMO looks real cool with nice graphics and... what? No sidekicking? What am I supposed to do if I go out of town for a couple of weeks and my friends level past me? Spend a day power levelling!?! Uhh... yeah... nevermind.
Amarsir pointed out a lot of good things. People may have problems with the amount of instanced missions in CoX, but they are all scaled to your level and difficulty. You never have to worry about coming up on enemies that are 10 levels beyond, or below your level. Outside of a few bugs here and there of course.
I think the problem in the other games is that they don't bother to put unique instances in each area. In CoX, a team could go in the same door doing the same mission as my team, but we go to different maps and never see each other. In other MMO's (ok, I've seen this with LOTRO) there is just the one instance and you can have multiple teams running around which could mean you will have to wait to fight the key creature or wait for the object you need to respawn.
I think the way CoX has done things is much better in this regard. I think because 90%+ of our missions are instanced, things like scaling were considered. In other MMO's it's 90% street sweeping, or similar things outside of any instances. So they just don't think about things that we take for granted here in CoX.
I've mentioned in the LOTRO forums about how they need to have sidekicking. It was generally poo-pooed. They did like the exemp idea, but not too keen on the sidekicking. The player would lose out on too much content they figured. Of course that game only gives you 5 total toons, so it's not like you will be doing the same content 12 times like you can in CoX, but still.
I like being able to sidekick and can't understand the arguments against it.
Uber Talgrim - level 50 emp/dark defender
Uber Rod - level 50 dark melee/regen scrapper
Rod Valdr - level 50 invuln/SS tanker
Talgrim - level 50 ninja/dark mastermind
OMG!! Please add these costume designs now!
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so it's not like you will be doing the same content 12 times like you can in CoX
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Pre-level-20 I might have to change that number from 12 to upwards of 48... 
Goodbye may seem forever
Farewell is like the end
But in my heart's the memory
And there you'll always be
-- The Fox and the Hound
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One thing I'd like to add on is the intelligence of the respawn logic here. It's made easier by the use of instances, but still didn't have to be done this way. They go out of a way to make sure that an enemy will (usually) not appear out of thin air, not spawn on top of you.
I hate that in other games, where I walk into an empty field, think I'm fine, and suddenly enemies are appearing out of nowhere and aggroing on me. Because as it turns out, someone went through and cleared them all 9 minutes ago. It's immersion-breaking and it's annoying and I couldn't stand it.
Here, even ambushes come running from around a corner. You may leave a spot, come back and find it repopulated, but for the most part it's always behind your back in a way that could be believed.
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Quoting this and agreeing 100%. There are times when spawns will appear in plain view in CoH but it's pretty rare (I've seen Malta and Carnies spawn on sidewalks in PI this way with a kind of teleporter effect). Even better, though, is that if you clear an area, it stays cleared until you leave. It's logical, it's clean and it works. Much better than the automated respawn timers so many other MMOs use (or if CoH has one, it's long enough that I've never particularly noticed it).
(To be fair, this design could be a problem in games that rely mostly on spawns in the overland part of the world, as it would be pretty easy for a player or players to clear an area and then effectively grief others by preventing a named boss or something else from re-appearing by simply staying put in the spot they've cleared.)
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Whats left?
Doing the same kind of missions again and again?
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Pretty much. I'm going to play the same mission whether I'm levelling up or not.
Some people actually like playing the game itself to be more entertaining than planning builds and getting powers. I, myself, enjoy the storyline progression of the game, but I am also very, very happy to know that some of my characters are "done." All I want out of this game is more stuff to kill.
What more do I NEED?