What makes an MMO?

My answer is nothing of the sort. I don't believe for a second that what Blizzard have done is easy or trivial, or even that it prays on fools. On the contrary, what they do is ingenious. Rather than reinvent the wheel, Blizzard pick the MOST average, most cliché, most basic game type in a given genre, and they just make flawless, smooth, clean and engaging game out of it. Rather than overcomplicated, ambitious ides, they take simple, basic ideas and polish them to perfection.

Blizzard have invented almost nothing of their own. Their games are hideously derivative of other games that came before. What Blizzard are experts at, however, is picking a genre, getting their foot in the door and creating very much the best game in the genre. In so doing, they sweep up all the fans of the genre in their game, score big and move on to the next genre. That's why they generally have only one game per genre - Diablo for the dungeon crawler, WarCraft and StarCraft alternately for the RTS genre and World of Warcraft for the MMO genre. That's all they need - one game to serve as the best.

The original WarCraft was nothing even remotely original. It was a Fantasy C&C knockoff, which itself was the successor of Dune: Battle for Arakis. Warcraft 2 shared a lot of similarities with its contemporary counterparts, like Dark Reign, KKND and the other low-key strategy games. From then on, they've essentially been remaking WarCraft 2 over and over again. StarCraft was WarCraft in space, WarCraft 3 was a lot of the same, and now StarCraft 2 looks like StarCraft in 3D. Just as an example.

Making money off execution over idea is what Blizzard do best, and they've made tons of cash off that. What they do is ingenious, but they are essentially the only company in the history of gaming that has been able to do that to such extreme success. So I make a pass for Blizzard. When I say you can't re-release the same game over and over again and expect to stay on top, this counts for everyone BUT Blizzard. This is what they do, this is what they're good at, and so they don't count. But anyone who is NOT Blizzard attempting to do what they do WILL FAIL.

See, here's the thing - Blizzard games sell on pure quality above and beyond everything else. There's nothing innovative in them, or anything all that spectacular to catch your eye if you're not already a fan. All they have is quality of manufacture. They're big, they're expansive, they're well-balanced, they have good graphics, voice overs, cinematics and so on and so forth. This is their thing, and as long as they make games, they're going to hold that position. Other developers who are not Blizzard yet try to make it big on their model will fail.

Blizzard's games will always have one extra level of polish and shine, and so they'll always hold the top spots. Other developers will have to think of something to offer that Blizzard's games do not already. As the old saying goes - you can't beat WoW by giving players the same things WoW gives them. They can just play WoW to get that. You can only beat WoW by giving players something WoW DOESN'T. Hence the cornerstone of my argument - WoW holds the high ground and can afford to set the mould. Everybody ELSE has to improvise, or they WILL fail.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

That time and cost is due to incorrect thinking in the first place. Jack actually thought that people would start missions, realize that they had an AV to fight and then leave those missions to go look for help. That's how all MMO makers thought at one point. When I first started playing EQ and realized that I was getting quests that I could in no way complete on my own, I was scratching my head. Why would you even design a game along those lines unless its a single player RPG where the player controls a party of characters of his own selection?

The reality of things is that people don't always have a ready group of in-game friends that they can call on whenever they log in to help them with a specific task. The reality is that a number of people think its a pain in the *** to even need to ask for help with something that they started as a solo effort. Some people don't want to be particularly social even though they are playing an MMO. Some folks just want to play a good game period.

That kind of group interdependency is something that squarely belongs in tabletop PnP games. I don't have any sympathy for designers who fail to take that kind of thing into account and then find they have to retrofit their game because they thought that an actual inconvenience like that lends some kind of challenge to make gameplay more interesting.

Yes, that means I have no sympathy for NCSoft, Sony or any other game developer with that kind of shortsightedness.

Case in point again. I read in an interview that most of the people who were on the Tabula Rasa team didn't feel that the game was fun. It played well enough and had all these elements but it didn't feel like fun to the people who were making it. They launched it anyway(because obviously it would feel like fun to other people...). If that was Blizzard, you can bet your butt they would have redone what needed to be redone in order to MAKE the game fun. Which is their number one priority.

Sorry for the sideways rant there...but I just felt compelled to say it.

So Blizzard is the only company that can actually make quality games, and everybody else has to use innovation to hide the stench of failure?

That's a rather depressing outlook.

I'd say, rather, that quality sells more than innovation does. Or rather, that since gaming is a diversion, if a game doesn't work well, it doesn't matter what it does. Regardless of how visually impressive the fighting game is, if the controls aren't responsive so that the AI is the only one who can put on a lightshow, you're not going to enjoy playing it.

...actually this may be a more depressing outlook: the people who fund MMOs have no idea how hard it is to actually make a good-quality one, and neither do most of the programmers.

Rather, Blizzard make the highest-quality games, so beating them to their market share requires more than just quality. Since you can't beat them on sheer quality alone (or budget size, for that matter), you need to come up with something they don't have. Sheer quality pretty much always goes to them, but there are plenty of creative ways to make up the difference.

It IS depressing, and pretty much the cornerstone of everything I dislike about MMOs. So much money and development time goes into giving the MMO all the stock features, and yet no-one ever seems to stop and think how much FUN the damn thing actually is to play. The quality of the MMO is in the numbers game, but the ACTUAL game falls sadly short.

Something like Lineage II is a good example - a system of grinds more complicated, involved and demanding than life itself, and the graphics look amazing in still shots, but... The actual gameplay is utter crap. Animations are stilted, combat is monotonous and boring and even the big battles aren't actually all that impressive.

Very few MMOs are actually quality products in the slightest, and that's not even counting how many are rushed out the door unfinished. MMOs just don't even shoot for quality, because that's not what they sell on. I actually feel City of Heroes has more quality than most, at least most until fairly recently. The game actually looked good for its time and manages to look good now, combat is interesting, animations are, for the most part, pretty impressive and someone actually spared a thought for the story, giving us a storyline that's more than a vague excuse to go hunt 10 frogs. Certainly it's not ideal, but given most of its competition at the time, and especially given Castle and BABs' constant vigilance and high quality standard, it IS a pretty good contender.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Tabula Rasa was wrong on a lot of fronts. And the funding thing may indeed have been a huge goad in their sides to push a release. They completely changed what the game was in mid development(as far as I understand) from a medieval fantasy to sci-fi space game.

The thing is, how many times do developers/publishers have to learn the hard way that you can't release a half-***** MMO and 'fix' it later with a reasonable guarantee of success? Your game has to be compelling from the start. And that is even more the case now than it was in the past when people were less familiar with MMOs.

But other types of games DO tend to do that if they are well made and fun! Like Starcraft, TF2, Neverwinter Nights, Quake 3, Diablo 2, Half-Life, Total Annihilation etc. Non-MMO games that are just plain fun to play are around and making money long after their release because of the quality of the game made.

This is a separate point, but I truly believe that the problem isn't how much base content you release, its the replayablity and quality of that content that extends the life of the game. If you keep pushing out static and non-dynamic content that doesn't ever change either the game world or offer players alternate paths to it's end...you are going to keep falling into the trap of never enough.

Except I don't believe that either forcing people to beat each other over the head to generate 'content' is really all that viable for most MMOs and the whole 'trinity' idea is simply a case of faulty game design.

Number one, if decently implemented PVP isn't the focus of your game from the start, you are likely to do more harm than good when you introduce it. Take a look at us for a good example.

Number two, the trinity idea simply does not always prove to be practical. 'Looking 4 h3lr'

There is nothing wrong with giving higher rewards to a group than to an individual if the group can accomplish something that the individual can't. Making grouping the ONLY viable choice to get anywhere is the real mistake.

An assumption based off of wrong thinking. Its the type of assumption that leads to the development of MMO games where the 'Game' is truly an afterthought and all the developers think makes any difference is the Massively and Multiplayer aspects.

What I'd like is a decent game period. And I personally think this game has suffered from not distancing itself even more from other MMOs by adding gameplay elements that enhance the superhero and comic book side of things and played down the traditional MMO elements a bit more.

I think that the issue is when and how often is a team 'needed'. If your entire game is spent making it clear that there is no good things to be had outside of a large group, then you've failed. If there are areas in your game that truly require multiple people to complete objectives, and those things are implemented in a fun way, then people will have a desire to team anyway. But it should be on the players' terms.

This is a major problem I have with MMOs in general, what I like to call the "everquest effect." Not necessarily unique to the game EverQuest, this is the mentality that an MMO should never "end" and that it must therefore take you FOREVER AND A HALF to get anywhere decent. Frankly, I enjoy City of Heroes exactly because the game takes the opposite approach. It can let you get to the "end" fairly quickly, but because you can only see so little of the content on the way up AND because it wasn't a horrible grind getting there, then feeling inclined to do it all again is that much easier. MMO development can never keep up with the rate of content consumption, so it makes sense to get people to play them over and over again, rather than trying to develop faster than they play.

This is the other big thing, and something I've been getting at this entire time. "A good game" is something actually very few MMOs can be described as. All too often, they're giant time sinks and addictive grinds, with the actual gameplay being something players are taught to AVOID. Sometimes it feels like they designed the MMO aspects first, then someone slapped his forehead and said "Doh! We need a GAME to put this auction house and that loot and that crafting in! That completely slipped my mind!" And I'd really like to play a game, first and foremost. If the game isn't fun, all the trinkets in the world won't make it worth the money.

Put it this way - an MMO game without loot is still better than loot without a game attached to it.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The bolded part is not always true. Some players will see really fun content that requires a team and say "that looks like fun: I should team to see it." Others will say "that looks like fun: how dare the devs force me to team to see it."

The problem is that for some players, the definition of "optional" is "I don't care about it." Or to put it another way, for some (all too many) players, the phrase "fun, optional content" is a contradiction: if its fun, its not optional that they have access to it.

But Kitsune seems to be suggesting something else entirely. Kitsune is saying of the people who at least sometimes want to team when they team they want to feel needed by the team, and yet somewhat hypocritically if they were to choose not to team they wouldn't need the rest of the team. So they need me, but I don't need them. That is a feeling that is logically impossible to satisfy for all players fairly, even though dev teams keep trying to various degrees.

I would tend to say, especially in this game, that if someone claims to have felt like they were not needed, its probably because they were in fact not needed, and leave it at that. The need to satisfy that feeling is not one of the current design goals of this game.

Tell that to the Defenders forum.

It's not impossible to satisfy, it's just impossible to satisfy for all people on the team at the same time. I'm an emotional hypocrite, and I've built my life around stinging events such that things turn out to satisfy my view of how things should happen. When I team, therefore, I usually team with lower-level players on a lower difficulty. Bringing in a lowibie (or two or three) 20 levels below you gives you a team which very much needs me, because lowbies just aren't mechanically capable of handling high-level content without a lot of hassle and trudge. I, on the other hand, am playing on a difficulty that's fairly easy for me, personally, and I'm usually capable of handling two, three people's worth of enemies with at least some degree of comfort, so I technically don't NEED them.

But that's hypocrisy in action, as well as engineered circumstances, and it's not actually fair to my team-mates. To get "my fix," I end up putting other people in a position that I wouldn't feel was ideal for myself to be in. There is no way that I can think of for all of us to feel needed on the team, yet at the same time not feel like we need the team. When everyone is strong enough to not need a team, then people teaming together are much stronger than they need to be, and usually half the people can fall asleep without much of anyone noticing. Think about a team of eight Masterminds, for instance. One Mastermind can drop off the face of the Earth, and not only will the team not suffer in the slightest, but NO-ONE WILL NOTICE.

Now, there's something to be said about difficulty scaling. Scaling your difficulty down when you are solo so that you don't feel you need a team, while upping it while you team so you feel the team needs you, is a possible strategy towards achieving that. However, and this is the crucial point, oftentimes lowering your difficulty to "very easy" feels like a cop out, like a severe loss of rewards (and it usually is), and like you're not actually playing the game, but rather just skipping over it. In this aspect, it can feel like, yes, you can kill stuff, but you still need a team to REALLY play, because the REAL difficulties are too difficult.

As the saying goes, you can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time. It's possible to get that feeling for one, maybe a few people on a team, but it's always at the expense of other people on the team, so it's literally impossible to get EVERYONE on the team to feel like this. Someone has to need a team for someone else to be needed on the team.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Sorry, I might have been mixing up the idea of need with simply being an asset to a team.

They are not the same, of course. I think that it's entirely possible in most situations to be of assistance to a team without being needed by the team for it's very survival. If there are people who think that they need to be the cornerstone of a team every single time, then they may have some other issues which a game isn't really supposed to address.

Barring a colossal level difference, I think that just about everyone can contribute something to a team in CoX. They may not be part of the glue that holds the team together...but additional damage, defense, controls etc. are pretty much always an asset to even the most capable group. Actually, just being there increases spawn size.

On the nose.

I don't think these things are impossible ("Row! Row! Fight the Powa!"), just that they seem difficult and possibly to be more effort than they are worth to most developers.

The last time that I played Guild Wars, they had acheived a good balance of teaming and soloing mechanics in what seems to be a unique way: in their system, any player can earn any power, but all players are limited to having only 8 or so 'ready to use' at any time. They can only change these out in 'town', so while you are on a quest you are stuck with your current build.

Thus, instead of looking for a healer, a team will gather and then draw straws to see who will be the healer. I think this design is sheer genius. A team does require certain roles, but role /= character. I think the multiple builds allowed in the City of ... is a good step in this direction, but it wouldn't fit superherodom to go all the way.

Then they go and 'ruin' this by having plentiful npc bots you can hire that fill the traditional roles, thus negating almost any benefit to teaming anyway.

This combines with the fact that all locations outside of town are instanced to truly give the feel of a single player game you can invite people into. YMMV on that.

However, I don't play it because I can really only afford one MMO time-wise, and City of... is it. That and you can't jump in that game. I hate that.

Or that almost all developers seem determined to approach them in the exact same way.

See, my problem with that is: What if no one wants to be the healer? Or no one wants to be a tank? The actual requirement for no other reason than requirement's sake is something that annoys me to the core.

My major issue with fantasy MMOs using the holy trinity is that it all stops at combat. The supporting mechanics of the surrounding game halt role effectiveness at defeating an enemy. I'd be more happy with that kind of setup if there was more to gameplay than just this. Even CoX is guilty of it. Except that CoX no longer really does heavy role dependency(something which I'm continually grateful for).

It doesn't fit superherodom at all. The Flash doesn't dash out of a fight and come back with healing powers. Batman doesn't exit a mission and come back with impenetrable skin (well he might come back with some additional Bat-Armor). In any case...heroes don't run off and change their roles. It's useful for PVP though, I guess.

My point is that plugging the trinity into every game just because it seems easy is a cop out. You create an artificial need that relegates someone to a single task which turns out to be pretty darn one dimensional most of the time. It just grinds my gears...

It's not that the roles are required for their own sake (though there is some of that, to please those players who prefer to have defined roles), the problem is in the number of ways that exist to make combat 'difficult' and in limiting player choice so they don't become bored by seeing everyone play the same build.

It also has to do with player expectations.

If a monster hits hard, the players are going to expect there to be a damage-mitigating or healing build they can call upon. Unless of course they can just steamroll over it, in which case how hard it hits is probably irrelevant.

I think what CoX does right here is to make the individual role multidimensional in a non-trivial way: you can make a pure healer, but you can also make a good enough healer that can also DPS or Control, etc. Even if you are a pure 'healer', there are multiple ways to build and execute it that work, look, and feel different from each other.

In order to get completely away from the 'trinity' in an MMO, you'd have to go with a completely different combat dynamic that omitted some options. For instance, just omit the ability to heal the wounds of others throughout the game entirely, and build around that.

This brings up a good point. In City of Heroes, and indeed in most MMOs, practically our only interaction with the environment is via killing stuff. Our powers kill stuff, protect us so we can kill stuff, buff us so we can kill stuff better, debuffs stuff so it can't kill us before we kill it, control stuff so it doesn't fight back while we kill it, or are completely cosmetic. Granted, travel powers sort of count as something else, but by and large, killing stuff is the point of the game. As a matter of fact, SKIPPING fights is actually bad for you.

Much as I hate the D&D system to its core, it had an interesting idea with its selection of traps, hidden doors and locked chests and locations. On the one hand, it REALLY sucked when you lacked the ability to disarm/spot/unlock, but on the other hand it gave parties with these characters more options. Instead of going down into the guard room and killing all the guards to get the key to the vault, your Rogue could simply pick the lock and get you the loot all the faster. Or, in a staggering feat of sideways design, you could rig the generator under the Children of the Cathedral's cathedral to explode, bypassing the final boss entirely.

One of the big problems with MMOs in general is that they ARE combat, and as such non-combat characters are completely useless. The only way a character can help his team is by helping them in combat, and a character who can't help in combat in any way is dead weight. Never you mind that this character would be invaluable in an actual story, such as opening doors, finding secret tunnels, reading coded texts, reading minds and so forth.

Now, I'm probably the first person to say that City of Heroes is a combat game, and well it should be. Frankly, I'm not in the slightest bothered by our lack to contribute by any means outside of killing things. Even if we could, I'd still pick a Scrapper and just walk through the front lines. But it's this over-reliance on combat in MMOs that leads to the "tank/healer/damage dealer" trinity which is so absurd in this day and age. And I gotta' tell you, I'd laugh my *** off at the tank, healer, damage dealer optimised team that suffers for not taking along a locksmith or an engineer.

Really, though, that's outside the scope of most MMOs. It's more something like what you'd find in MDK 2, where you had three characters, each with his distinct gameplay. Max, the four-armed dog's gameplay was shoot-em-up action with lots of guns, bombs, explosives and carnage. The Doc's approach was radically different - puzzles, puzzles and more puzzles, plus a nuclear toaster firing nuclear toast, exploding nuclear bagels and homing loafs of nuclear bread. Kurt's gameplay was somewhere inbetween, with some shooting, a lot of sniping and, acrobatics and (some) stealth.

It's like the old D&D thought experiment - a Warrior, a Mage and a Thief need to get through a room full of zombies, past a locked door and into a locked chest, get the treasure and get out alive. MMOs basically follow the Warrior's path in practice almost every time.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I meant to imply that it was impossible for MMO developers to ensure with their game design, not that it was an impossible circumstance for individual players to engineer around themselves. It is of course always possible to feel simultaneously needed by the team and not need them yourself if you choose to only team with people that don't you don't need.

But for a game to attempt to engineer this as a player-entitlement as opposed to a happenstance requires setting up unfair teaming requirements, which is why I said its impossible to do so for all players fairly.

This goes back to the point of what is appropriate for the setting and type of game the MMO is. None of that stuff that you listed is actually inappropriate for a fantasy MMO. And yet none of that stuff gets put into fantasy MMOs. Reagrdless of if it can be made to work or not...no one has really tried to my knowledge.

Well it bothers me. And I'm not alone in that. The problem is again the setting of the game. We here on the forums can sit back and tell ourselves that this is a MMORPG first and foremost so the fact that we don't have x or y is fine because they are not going for comic book feel, they are going for RPG.

In my experience though, I've seen a number of people pass up the game for just that reason. They want more. Or at least they want more of the things that you would expect to find in a typical superhero setting.

The fact is that in CoX, we don't get to do a lot of things that people have expected heroes to be able to do. It comes back to how people perceive superheroes and what they actually see when they look at this game.

One of my favorite games, Freedom Force, is a great example of this. At it's heart, its a simple tactical RPG where you take up to 4 heroes and try to defeat the bad guys.

The difference is in the execution. The entire game environment screams 'superhero'. From the cheesy silver age dialogue to the fact that both you AND the enemy can use their surroundings to gain an advantage. Pick up a car and throw it at those guys over there.

Bad guy shooting at you from the top of a building, smash the side of the building and make the roof collapse to he drops to your level.

And it had all the superhero travel powers we have, plus levels and consequences of causing too much destruction of property. But underneath it was still an RPG with numbers and levels and unlocking new characters etc.

What I'm saying is that we're more progressive in terms of combat than any other MMO I know of right now. The problem is that people aren't looking at the game and going: 'Wow...this combat beats EQ 2's combat. I'm switching.'

What I see happening more often is people going: 'Is that all there is to the game?' Now this might very well be an unfair question in light of what some other MMOs offer. But they aren't looking at other MMOs because up until recently, there were no other superhero MMOs. They do know the sorts of things that superheroes tend to do and we don't do a lot of them.

In trying to hypothesize an MMO that doesn't have required roles, I think sometimes we try too hard to imagine an MMO that doesn't have any requirements *at all* for its encounters and that's actually silly.

I think its bad, or at least limiting, if a game has encounters that require "a healer." But I don't think its at all unfair to make encounters that require a minimum level of damage mitigation of some kind, such that teams below the minimum are likely to fail.


On that subject, I'm someone that believes the whole concept of "failure" in general is something that isn't well explored in the MMO space. Failure is usually binary: you win, or you lose. There's no in-between. And without an in-between, there's less opportunities for experimentation and learning.

Consider the case of an AV in City of Heroes. Its supposedly not intended to be soloable content. That doesn't mean AVs are impossible to solo, it just means they aren't designed to be soloable. If you can't solo any of the AVs in the game, that's not a problem: that's working as intended.

What that means is that if you aren't one of the players with the build and combat skill to solo an AV, there's two possibilities when you encounter one (assuming it isn't downscaled to an EB in your presence). One: you run. Two: you die.

There's no third option, which is actually the most common option in the genre when this type of situation occurs. And that's Three: you learn something from the encounter and come back with a greater chance for victory.

I'm not suggestion what I'm about to say would be easy to implement across the entire game, but suppose that an AR/Dev blaster runs into an AV, and can't defeat it. Instead of being locked into the choice of essentially permanently running away, or fighting until death, what if an additional option was for the blaster to recognize they were not going to win the fight and change the goal from defeating the AV to collecting information on the AV instead. Perhaps they record the fight and then run, and from that recording develop additional weaponry specifically designed to assist with that AV. On the next encounter, the blaster would have a little more damage against that specific target, or a little more resistance to the offense of that specific AV. Perhaps with each encounter, the blaster could use the invention system to craft increasingly stronger temp weapons which would eventually allow the blaster to "solo" that AV. Or alternatively the blaster's primary attacks gained increased effectiveness against that target somehow (increased efficiency, better targeting of weak spots) in the same way Nictus weapons are tuned to affect Kheldians. I don't think it would be conceptually unpalatable to require "temp powers" if they were done right: Martial Artists could learn a special strike to use against the AV, Electric Blasters could learn to tweak their energy discharge to disrupt the AV's neural system, whatever. The point is that this mechanism doesn't have to literally be "craft an I Win gadget." Heck: players might even enjoy collecting these things.

In between successfully soloing the AV and failing (dying) against the AV would be a large grey area of not exactly winning, but not exactly losing either, and building up the ability to eventually win. Instead of having "soloable content" and "not soloable content" there could be "intended to be soloable by anyone" and "may require significant effort to engineer a way to solo" and finally "not intended to be (but could be) soloable even with unlimited effort."

Making this work in a way that was palatable in teams and not just solo would require additional creativity, but I think its still possible. In fact, in teams I could imagine some members of the team trying to keep an AV busy while one or two others were actually crafting the AV enhancements right there in the fight. Imagine I'm an MA/Invuln brute whacking away on a Hero that I'm trying to keep aggro on, while a mastermind was working on an AV enhancement because the team was unable to defeat the Hero. Conceptually, the MM would analyze the Hero and determine its weakspots, and then communicate that to me. "Hey, try this!" Mechanically, he'd craft an invention that he would then use on me to grant me a special power: Mongoose Strike or whatever. Then I would start using that power against the AV, which would significantly increase my damage against him, or debuff his incoming damage so I could survive longer, or whatever. Maybe not this exactly, but something like this would, I think, add significantly to the options available to team balance and soloability.


Getting back to the question of required roles. I think, to oversimplify a bit, that team encounters should not explicitly dictate roles or special individual characters, but its fair game to say that the encounter requires a certain amount of X, Y, and Z, and allow the players to assemble those between the team mates in flexible ways. And if the team finds itself short on Y, there should be sufficient hints that they are short on Y and give them a path to get it, up to a certain point (in Champions Online one form of flexibility are roles/stances, and in Star Trek Online its power distribution settings; City of Heroes doesn't have quite the same type of options yet, although we've come close once or twice).

If you're really crafty, the best of all possible encounter "arithmetic" would be if the encounter required some amounts of A, B, C, and D and success required (at least as a minimum requirement) f(A,B,C,D) > Min, but there were many possible combinations of A, B, C, and D that would satisfy that requirement (or many different ways to get A-D, or both), and thus there would be many different kinds of team composition that would work. That's difficult, but not impossible, but usually requires significant cooperation from the underlying game mechanics to pull off.

To each his own. I picked up City of Heroes because it looked like a good game and DESPITE it being a super hero game, not BECAUSE of it. I'm not terribly concerned, myself, with what's actually expected of super heroes, or for that matter what's expected of MMOs. I'm mostly concerned about having a good, decent game. And I do. It's a fighting game, from where I'm standing, but then that's really good enough for me. Marvel Super Heroes was a fighting game... Very much a fighting game, yet that was one of the better games ever made with the Marvel characters.

This goes back to the old argument about "depth," which in turn probably goes back to "what makes an MMO." Personally, I don't see depth as a necessary prerequisite of any MMO, or indeed any RPG. As a matter of fact, what passes for depth all too often interferes with the actual gameplay of the game, and I've never been above just playing the heck out of a simple, shallow, fun game. That's why I fell in love with Torchlight as much as I did.

Is that what makes an MMO? Depth, things to do outside of combat, an accurate representation of the source material and so forth? I recently spent a lot of time talking about "just a good game," and really, MMO or otherwise, this is what I look for. I don't expect any one game to have everything, and if an MMO opts to be combat only or even just combat mostly, that's fine. Combat is good enough and, to be completely honest, the more they muddy the waters with out of combat activities, the less I actually like the overall game.

I'm REALLY the wrong guy to talk to about this. I never actually liked comic books, so a game which screams "super hero" would be a serious turnoff for me. I HATE that "cheesy silver age dialogue" and all the concepts that come with it. If I have to be quite honest, that's a big reason I highly doubt I'll ever take another look at Champions Online. All the camp and the cheesy just grate on my nerves. If that's what it means to be closet to comic books, then let them have it. I'm happy with THIS game exactly because it does not follow the comic book genre too closely.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Very good point. Most of these activities that you mentioned, as well as the ones I talked about, are things that can really only be done by one person at a time, and generally only by that particular specialist. You can't really look over the shoulder of your locksmith and help him pick the lock. That's not how it works. So while he's picking the lock, the rest of the team is playing pattycake. Bad design right there.

Combat, on the other hand, is something everyone can help with all at the same time, which doesn't require one person to do something while the others wait. Well, unless you're devices, but that philosophy's faults have been discussed at length. Basically, if one player's skills unlock some kind of out-of-combat shortcut, chances are the rest of the team will have to sit on their hands, or the ulocking will be instant, killing a lot of the point. Do we really want a door that only, say, Stalkers can click on to open?

The point of this isn't to just have the person on the team. As with all game systems, you want that person to be useful by DOING stuff, not just by being on the team. But on the flip side, you don't want to give that person so much to do that the rest of the team has to sit around and wait. It's a careful balancing act, and I'm not sure this is impossible, but I can safely say that it's not trivial.

Of course, the other approach is the Lost Vikings setup, where people can combine their skills to pass by locations they would have had to go around, by, say, having a Tanker hold a gate open while a Controller slips through and holds the counterweight in place such that it doesn't close. Just for instance. But then the complexity and specific nature of these make them highly unlikely to be seen on a larger scale.

Nevertheless, why don't we have buttons that open doors? This is such a gaming classic!

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

OK, this is my favourite out-of-context quote of the day, and it's going straight in my scrapbook. Thanks

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I think the concept of multiple victory options is orthogonal to what I'm thinking of rather than an alternative to what I'm thinking of. Even with a mission with multiple paths to success, you still have the potential problem that to make it legimitate "team" content it has to be very difficult in all its victory permutations for a solo player to accomplish. And since the range of capabilities for individual players is high, the range of capabilities for teams of players is also high. And that means its very difficult to make "hard" team content that isn't impossibly hard for too many teams, or too trivial for too many others. You still have a higher emphasis on binary failure than I think is a good idea.

I think multiple victory options is a good idea regardless, its just addressing a different issue to me: that of gameplay diversity in general.