Jack Emmert?

I still remember the gist of a comment he made in a thread about (I think) Invulnerability or tanking.

It went something along the lines of 'I was on an invuln tanker last night with a team of 6 fighting carnies. I would just tank the Strongmen and I was fine. So invuln is fine. FINE!, you hear me, FINE!'

I paraphrase more than a little there

From what little I can recall, the thread erupted after his post. The general feeling I got from what followed was that people didn't think he knew how to tank worth a damn, what with leaving the squishier team members to deal with all the non-strongmen. You know, the Illusionists, Master Illusionists, Ring Mistresses, Seneschals, Harlequins, Attendants...

This also leads on to one other issue I always had reading Statesman's posts. He'd arrive in a thread and either post something utterly inconsequential or as in the tanking thread, post something that caused an uproar and then never post again in the thread following up on the whys or the wherefores raised in response to his posting. Left a lot of loose ends dangling.

I've more or less gotten over Jack though. I barely even twitch when he's mentioned any more. Although that's probably partly due to being an EU player, and we never really got the same level of exposure to his wisdom.

I do still like to remember some of the old stories though, if only to remind myself of how far the communication with the players has come, and how stable the game is compared to the nerf bat days.

If you ever want an education, go read the old patch notes on paragonwiki and notice the change in emphasis from massive and regular rebalancing/nerfing/tweaking/fiddling about under the bonnet to the current situation where patch notes tend to be about bug fixes, new stuff or balance fixes.

Disclaimer - My original toon is a Katana/Regen scrapper. I got hit hard and repeatedly by the nerf bat back in those days (I started at EU launch, so from Issue 3 onward).

I remember that write-up. My reaction:

Actually that's not entirely true. Real numbers wouldn't be very helpful if the powers descriptions themselves are wrong. If Nova said it did fire damage with a chance to hold, would the numbers for the power help at all knowing the power does no such thing? I think it's telling that six months post-release, CO is still doing power and advantage description corrections. But I don't think it's right to blame Jack for that. I think you should blame Jack for hiring a failed lead designer/"creative director" just because he wrote instruction manuals at Blizzard years ago.

That's not to say Jack isn't a clueless wonder though. I'm going to remember this quote, from his very fingers, forever. From "Launching Champions Online" here:

So, lemme get this straight. You're supposed to be the head honcho for a studio that considers itself a major player in the MMO genre and you didn't know UI is extremely important? Any player could've told you that. Oh wait, yeah, Jack doesn't listen to players. My bad. But does that mean he never appreciated the work people like pohsyb did here? And honestly, if Bill Roper made Champions better than Jack could imagine, his imagination is extremely limited and I would've hated to see the product it would've produced. Then again, this is the same person who felt Nintendo games from the FIRST Game Boy generation were the height of creative and fun gameplay.

That's because the big balance fixes are already done. They don't exactly need to do the same thing twice, and I think a lot of people like to overlook that when they laud the current devs over past ones. (I also think the Powers That Be knew exactly what would happen when leadership changed - that people would immediately blame everything bad on the past lead when it was mostly just cosmetic shuffle.)

Right- I was exaggerating for effect.


But his reasoning on respec's always struck me as emblematic of his overall problem as a dev.

The refusal to give specific information about powers for philosophical reasons, forcing us to build characters based on vague, often confusing and sometimes flatly misleading power descriptions, and then making the mechanism to correct the inevitable mistakes a genuine PITA to use.

Remember what the Terra Volta trial was like at launch?

I had one character I REALLY wanted a respec for- not for structural reasons, just because I'd taken Teleport for his travel power and found out I HATED it.

I was really excited when the respec trial was added to the game....until about the 5th time we failed it after a long, hard slog (which I suppose fits Jack's definition of fun, based on the famous Gameboy anecdote). Rather than keep beating my head against the wall I parked that character and moved on to another one.

GG, Jack!

Extremely opinionated, never listened to any feed back, and had a few bad ideas.

You could almost be talking about CO right there

I loved the respec trial when it came, it was so ridiculously hard. I recall fighting 4-5 waves at once of +2/+3 mobs. Hilarious, specially on our gimped characters we desperatly wanted to respec. Felt so nice when we finally managed to finish it.

I really hate the new respec, it's WAY too slow between waves, kinda want the old one back.

Jack generally gets less blame than his actions deserve.


Aside from the providing the imputus to get the game launched (which certainly absolves some of his sins) I'm hard pressed to think of a single positive contribution he made.

Leaving?

So what you mean is that Statesman turned out to be a bit of a tyrant?

zing!

Right now, having the game experience and stable of characters I do, I'd likely enjoy the challenge of the 'original' respec.


At the time, my highest level character was in the mid 30's.
The character I wanted to respec was JUST 24, and slotted mostly with aging DOs. At that point I was still a 'casual player'- I didn't give a fig for efficiency, I picked powers that sounded cool and ran whatever missions came my way.

And I was running it with PUGs of people who were generally in worse shape than myself, characters with multiple travel powers, or who emphasized pool powers over primary and secondary. On Triumph you had to take what you could get, there was no huge population to pick and choose from.

The level of challenge wasn't appropriate given the desperate need many of my teammates had for the final reward. And aiming the hardest challenge in the game at the sort of characters least likely to be able to overcome it is just really bad design.

Me, I just parked my guy, played alts and waited it out.

My fluffies were also reduced from being able to have three to just having one. As far as Inherents go; they also threw out the Defenders version as a last second thought and it's been mostly useless ever since

I never understood why a trial that was created to give players the option of reselecting powers because they "gimped" their toon was as insane as it was when it first came out. That was one of those times I asked myself "Do the devs actually play this game?"

Considering Jack went from hero to pariah in less than a year and Matt has escaped hatred almost completely in the last, what... Three years? I'm not too worried about Melissa generating too much aggro. Jack's mouth is what got him into trouble, and neither of the other "lead developers" have had that problem. Matt is so laconic he's practically mute and Melissa has a silver tongue, so they've basically steered clear of trouble.

But even Castle and BABs, who've been basically knee deep in the community for years now, have largely avoided any real problems. If BABs every gets heat for anything, it's his kidding around, and never for his actual development work, which is a testament to the quality of such work and his insistence to do it right. Castle's usually "the one to blame" for balance decisions that don't sit well with people, but even he has never been accused of wilfully destroying the game or having some other underhanded reason to "nerf." The I13 PvP changes came the close to giving him heat, and even that wasn't too bad.

Really, outside of Geko, Jack is the only one on the greater development team who's gotten this kind of heat, and he hasn't been the only target of opportunity we've had over the years.

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.

ED was "sprung" on the CoV beta testers, but it wasn't stealthed into the game: we didn't need to notice it because as far as I recall it was actually announced in the beta. There was a giant commotion about it and then some of the beta testers leaked information about it to the general forums while we were still in closed beta. The devs had no time to release information about it ahead of time because it was improperly leaked, literally a day or so after we first saw it in CoV beta. That forced the devs to scramble to create an announcement on ED on the open forums a few days later.

ED might have been a surprise to players that don't frequent the forums, but that's true for all game changes. It was not a surprise to the players that were participating on the forums. And the people who leaked that information did this game and the playerbase in general no favors by doing so. The devs never had a chance to make a formal announcement and start discussion about ED prior to it going live, because they were preempted from doing so. So we'll never know what would have happened.

We will also never know if it would have been possible to steer the implementation of ED into slightly better implementations, because all the oxygen was sucked out of the room due to the controversy surrounding the feature.


Also, as far as I know there was no significant tweaking upward of defense sets after I6. I can tell you for a fact that SR was not tweaked upward, and it was hit probably the hardest by ED of every powerset. In fact, SR was the recipient of the statement (by Positron, I believe, not Statesman) that it was an advantage that SR could not diversify enhancements (because most of its powers only took defense, or defense and endurance enhancements) which meant SR scrappers could devote more slots to offense.

To which I sarcastically replied that maybe they should just double all the SR powers and make the unslottable, and *really* give us an offensive slotting advantage.

See, if there's anything I'd actually point to Jack and say "You dolt! This is stupid and it's all your fault!" it would be his incessant need to enforce HIS vision of difficulty. The famous "1 hero = 3 white minions" is just a personification of a larger problem - Jack's idea of where the difficulty curve should be did not match what the players thought. Easy example: Open your old City of Heroes manual and check out what the description for "boss" is. An enemy that's so strong that you'll need a team to take it down, and even though you might be theoretically possible for you to beat it alone, that would be an exception.

This is stupid for two reasons. First of all, this was NOT the case when the game launched, as many people were soloing bosses. Secondly, these things were thrown at us by the DOZEN in certain instances, and if a boss was supposed to be a challenge for a whole team, what on EARTH was a spawn of 6 +3 Chief Soldiers and Chief Mentalists that comprised every spawn in the Hydra trial?

Jack's vision of difficulty was that everything should be stupid hard, that we should be fighting for our lives at every turn and that we should be teaming. A LOT. Every bit of new content that was added was overbearingly difficult, and we had to fight him on EVERYTHING to make it just passable for us regular Joes not looking for the ultimate test of skill. The cape mission's initial incarnation was absurd, with a huge map and plenty of multi-boss spawns. The original respec trial was just too hard, and it had to be downgraded. And then I4 came and hit us with the now-infamous I4 Boss Buff. To me, after having spent so long trying to convince us to team for bosses, that patch was basically him saying "Fine. If you won't team for bosses, then there! Now you can't solo them and you'll HAVE to!" That was his whole approach - if players don't play quite how he envisions they should, he pushes for game changes to force them.

Of course, the boss buff was a colossal bust, as those able to solo bosses before - Scrappers and Tankers, largely - were still able to solo them pretty easily, and the rest of the characters were just boned. I have not seen another change of this magnitude rolled back as quickly and as completely as this. And you know what? I'm glad it was. That business with unsoloable bosses and warnings about them in mission descriptions that he was putting forward was AWFUL!

But that's a good example of why, how and where disagreements happened. He WOULD NOT LISTEN to players who told him that forcing bosses to be unsoloable was a mistake. That's not what the player base wanted. But he tried to, anyway. And he shouldn't have.

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.

So, professional game designers were just paralyzed by the (completely predictable) forum hysteria surrounding a gargantuan global nerf, rendered powerless to change it in any way by a bunch of enraged nerds using intemperate language?

Huh.

Anyway, ED + IOs works fine- if IOs had followed ED at a more reasonable interval things would've played out differently.

i remember that shortly after the respec trial went live my Force Field Defender became EXTREMELY popular with respec teams. i agree that the current respec trial can be too easy and tedious at times now, but i'm hoping for a return of the difficulty settings by the time GR launches. Until then it should stay fairly easy so that those who really need a respec can get them.

They did, but at times it seemed like the Dev team then didn't have access to the real numbers either. The time they effectively bumped bosses up a level while keeping their visible stats the same was amusing. The uproar was amazing, and it didn't take long to roll that change back. Which made the massive regen buff to AVs a year or so later all the funnier. Especially considering how many people were posting in the test forums with actual hard testing data and analysis as to why each change would not be fun for the casual players.

At that point i'd taken to playing with some very competent players, so it didn't affect me much. The AV buff happened at a time when my main was a D3 who had a -5000% regen debuff and a stacking -50% regen debuff, so it was good timing from my point of view.

There have been a lot of beneficial tweaks and adjustments to the game since it launched, and many of them while Jack was still in charge, so it's not like he approved nothing but bad things, it's just that he seemed determined to make poorly considered changes almost as often as the good changes, and he seemed to have far less understanding of the game mechanics than some of the players.

When i think back to all the hijinks that happened with Emmert at the helm today i'm just happy that the game has come so far since then. No anger, just a bemused shake of the head.

(IIRC the BS/Regen slaughtering +7's was because the code branch they used lacked the purple patch. Not exactly the same as making +7 critters the same as +0, but it does make them much, much easier.)

Jack's opinion that we shouldn't be just mowing over minions, that combat should have some chance of losing, and that players should be encouraged to team, all seem dumb in hindsight, but were all reasonable beliefs surrounding MMOs prior to CoH coming along. It was a legitimate fear that if content was too easy and everything could be soloed, people would become bored and fail to build the social networks necessary to keep the playerbase strong. CoH broke that assumption, and then WoW came along afterwards and shattered it, stomped on the pieces, and set the pile on fire.

Notice that when Cryptic makes a game in which it appears to be an actual design *feature* that combat be easy, almost impossible to lose, and have no penalty for dying (STO) people actually *beg* for it to be harder. You really can't win the philosophical high-ground against your most vocal players in this area.

Honestly, *I* think we mow down minions too easily. Its not that I think everything should be hard, its that I've always thought that the model for a casual game should be a little more like STO is now: very little reward for defeating individual critters, more reward for completing missions. If the reward for defeats is low, it doesn't matter how easy or hard they are from a progression-balance perspective. So you have a lot more freedom to make combat very flexible.

Its also a question of simple terminology, something I think they tried to address in CO. I think we should be balanced against "three minions" but its ok to call them "bosses." Then spawn some things lower and some things higher. There's no harm, in a superhero game, in allowing us to mow down lots of "underlings" that are no serious threat to life and limb but can slow us down when the real objective is always to finish the mission. The key is to make sure its clear when the combat is really just environmental, and when its significant.

After all, what is mowing down a room full of meaningless minions if not the destructible environment everyone asked for and we got in mayhem missions. Its just a specific kind of destructible environment that shoots back a little and moves around. Its all part of improving the immersion. Sometimes you want to take down one thing at a time, sometimes you want to take out an army. The game could have done both if it had just decoupled rewards from combat. But I suspect this is yet another area where the devs (not necessarily only Jack) wanted two incompatible things.

I'd generally agree with you there, as this really was unprecedented... If a large portion of us weren't telling him "Do not do this. This is a mistake. This is not what people want. You are screwing us all over and cheating us out of the game we grew to like. Stop trying to push for this." Saying it to his face, in fact. This wasn't a question of MMO design or practical fears. The player made it VERY clear that we enjoyed soloing bosses and he should look for some other way to encourage teaming. He didn't. I don't know whether this was because he honestly couldn't see a better way, or because he couldn't see the forest for the trees and got too bogged down trying to force his way, but the result was that a lot of changes, ESPECIALLY the I4 boss buff, were simply not good.

I'm actually glad the current development team is less preoccupied with saving us from ourselves and more with giving us what we want, within reason. Slapping people's wrists and trying to convince them that they don't really know what's good for them is a BAD MOVE. Posi, War Witch and company seem to understand this, so they do roughly what we're asking them to do, but in a way that still ensures the system works how they want it to work.

People asked for Blaster buffs, for instance. If this were Jack, he'd just shrug, say Blasters give up personal protection for damage and go about his merry way. The correct solution isn't to just cave in and let players redesign the AT, either. What they did was the best of both worlds. We asked for buffs and we got buffs, but to Castle's judgement of what would work best. We got a stronger AT, he got to keep balance where he wanted it and everyone was happy. Sometimes you just have to err on the side of the players and give them a little more than is probably wise. As a player, I know this is well appreciated. Certainly more appreciated than erring on the side of the game and always leaving me out in the cold.

This is something I've been suggesting for years. Mine went more along the line of just padding up spawns with Underlings so that it LOOKED like there were many enemies to fight, but their actual threat wasn't too much higher. Especially if Underlings are designed to sort of resemble minions, this is an easy solution to the problem. But I got too much disagreement over this emphasising AoE builds and the engine not being able to handle it, so I gave up on trying to argue the point. Suffice it to say I agree.

And you know what? I would not mind having the bulk of my reward shifted in mission completion. In fact, I wouldn't mind if completing meaningful tasks were the only way to level. It makes sense logically, it makes sense thematically and it would actually serve to reduce the sense of "grind" by lumping rewards into fewer, larger chunks. I found out many years ago that a large job is much more pleasant to do if you break it down into smaller but meaningful pieces. The less you have to count your successes, the less this stresses.

Killing minions is a tedious task, especially when you end up having to kill thousands. A few more minions here or there don't make a difference, because you need a LOT. But if missions were the primary source, then conceivably each mission would bring a notable benefit.

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.