Jack Emmert?

Don't blame that on us. The Regen folk were largely exhausted after the I3 and I4 fights. It was the Controllers (who lost their AoE Controls and Multiple pets); the other Melees (who took massive hits on their toggles); and defense buffers (who took massive hits on their buffs) who were after the devs.

I wasn't blaming this on "you," I guessed why he said it. I never claimed there was no reason to appease people, just that that seems to have been his intent. He said a lot of things to appease a lot of people over the years, and most of those things backfired on him.

And, really, does it matter WHO he was trying to appease? Point is, players expressed concern, he posted to alleviate it, only it turned out really badly for the guy.

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.

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.

Do I really need to put the smilies in the post to make it clear I'm not mad?

Fine then!

Oh... OK, then...

Boy, is my face red

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.

Rhetorical question, Sam.

Though I was not one of the rabble I understand and can explain this.

There were major power changes in the months before CoV and he did say no more major power changes.

Then ED came out and he tried to say that wasn't sweeping power changes because it was about enhancments not powers.

Many strongly felt that was an outright lie and many others felt that at best it was meaningless hairsplitting.

It didn't help he was already on many people's "list" already at that point. As for me, I felt he either was clueless and didn't get how people would take it or he was so full of himself he didn't care but I enjoyed the game and didn't have any characters impacted by ED so I didn't care. Being a horrible player had its advantages.

Yeah, yeah

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.

Probably the most tragic failing Jack had, at least in my opinion, was that almost everything he wanted wasn't bad in theory, it was that what he wanted required the game to change in other ways he didn't want. In other words, Jack was incompatible with Jack.

Canonical example: Real Numbers. Jack didn't want numbers in the game because he didn't want to encourage people to dwell over the numbers. Fair enough. But then he didn't make the executive decision to change the game mechanics so that it didn't *require* knowing the numbers to understand what was going on.

Consider that in an oversimplified example, if Accuracy buffs existed but Tohit buffs did not exist at all, Accuracy would be much easier to explain without having to resort to any significant discussion about either numbers or mechanics. This makes you hit twice as often, this makes you hit a quarter less often, and so forth. Accuracy would be intuitive in the absence of tohit (and defense). But accuracy, defense, and tohit interact in ways that its just *impossible* to either know or explain to anyone what is going one without resorting to very precise mathematical explanations. There is no "rule of thumb" for accuracy, so there's no causal understanding possible for accuracy. You know the formulas and the numbers, or you don't.

Jack *simultaneously* thought that the game mechanics didn't ultimately matter *and* the players shouldn't have to think about them carefully if they didn't want to. You can't have both: if you want the game to allow players to ignore the numbers, as developers you have to make sure the numbers always work in an intuitive manner, so that casual "guesses" are always at least close, if not precise. Jack was incompatible with Jack.

This happened again and again, with critter balance, with respecification, with enhancements, with practically everything that had a game mechanical connection. Jack needs an editor, and CO suggests to me he hasn't found one yet (the judgment is still out for me on STO: I don't actually "feel" Jack's influence in the mechanics of that game yet).

Yeah, and Blasters got the original version of Defiance, which increased their damage as their health dropped. Blasters had gotten hit pretty hard by ED and this was meant to somehow give them greater survivability. The logic behind it may have looked good on paper, but in-game it never quite worked out.

IMO, Jack just needs somebody that he trusts implicitly to call him on his BS. Somebody that's as smart as he is (or at least as smart as he thinks he is! ) who can tell him when what he wants is incompatible with what he's doing.

It worked fine for expert blasters, but it wasn't the expert blasters that needed the help. If you were dying before Defiance, giving you a power that would get stronger as you got closer to death sounds good on paper, but it was only encouraging those who shouldn't be at low health to stay at low health. Telling blasters that they should ask defenders not to heal them so they can stay at high damage was one of those rare moments when even by my very forgiving standards Jack exhibited major brain damage.

But surely he has time to work on it until he develops one?

And looking at CO, he does seem very intent on avoiding getting any respect at all.

Colossal nerf bat.

Didn't Jack leave CO's development for STO a lot earlier than he left CoH's development?


Also, in addition to any flaws the mans has, blame generally lands on the shoulders of the lead developer, simply because they're the face of the development team.

Also also, I believe CoH was the first video game Jack had ever worked on, never mind MMOs.

Jack wasn't opposed to respec per se. He believed in limited, infrequent respec because he believed respecification had the potential to dilute the value of the character into being just a container of powers that could be shuffled around. He wasn't wrong on that account. However, with the strength of the costume editor, character identification became much more strongly associated with character appearance than with character ability, something that was difficult to foresee in City of Heroes playerbase evolution.

The problem I think is that we have a range of powers options, starting with archetype selection, ranging through powerset selection, power selection, and then slot allocation, and then enhancement slotting. Making the invariant threshold slot allocation was too far down the tree: it left only enhancement slotting as the method for "playing around" with a build.

Ironically, the original concept for City of Heroes was that what we call the powerset was supposed to be our *powers* and what we call powers was supposed to be variations of that single power. So my power would be "Fire Blast" and things like Fireball and Flares would just be different "skills" I would learn in terms of how to use Fire Blast. Under that conceptualization, powers should really have been more easy to swap around at the beginning of time, because they are really just "tricks" to using the one true power: Fire Blast.

In this sort of game, you have to decide which decisions are more or less permanent and which are optional and reversible, because some decisions should have permanent consequences, and some should have temporary consequences that the player should be able to react to by changing things. That balances those two game play avenues. In retrospect, Jack had the right idea in general but went too extreme with it.

And once again, even this decision had a possible way out: if enhancements were stronger and more diverse, so that their decision weight could counter-balance archetype, powerset, power, and slot allocation decisions, then this could still have been reasonable. But that would require an even stronger invention system than we have now, and the game launched without crafting.

This was very interesting to learn. I don't know if I should have known it before or not but clearly I never understood it as well as you have presented it here.

Thanks.

Hard to say.


We'll see how much the playerbase starts beating up on War Witch next.


The design team clearly was thinking "pen and paper" in terms of their game design experience, and not leveraging what you could do with computers to high degree. That influence is extremely obvious in some respects, such as the 95%/5% tohit boundaries ("1 always misses, 20 always hits") and the "defense subtracts from tohit" aspect of the tohit system: defense is basically armor class. Very ironically, in Champions Online you can see they threw that P&P mental model out completely. Ironically, because so many people thought that even though Cryptic very specifically stated that they didn't license the Champions/HERO system, that CO would be at least significantly inspired by that mechanical system.

I did say on the pre-beta boards that I would bet anything that CO would either steer very far away from HERO, or if they patterned after it the game mechanics would be extremely and irrevocably broken with no recourse to fixing it. You can imagine how popular that statement was back then.