Jack Emmert?

See, this is one reason why Jack generated so much heat, and why you tend to generate so much heat on yourself practically every time you post. He treated his players like wayward children who didn't know what was good for them and had to be sweet-talked and lulled into sleep, but not actually taken seriously because the real adults know better.

Now, I'm man enough to admit I'm not a game designer and maybe my calls aren't always smart. That's fine, I can trust the professionals to design a game for me and I'll stick to just paying the bills. But when those professionals have been proven wrong time and time again, and when they appear to completely disregard my actual desires and wishes as a customer like I were a worker in a 10c am hour production line. Take it or leave it, they don't care about me.

Dealing with people, especially people who pay you money for a service, requires tact and the right approach. You get a free pass, because you're just as random a Joe as I am and I don't happen to be paying you for a service. When you dismiss me, I just ignore you and move on. Jack does not get the same free pass, because I was paying him a subscription and I expected a certain respect for it. Certainly $15 a month doesn't HAVE to buy respect, but there's no reason it couldn't. And I don't think Jack ever respected his player base.

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.

See, it's a matter of approach. For instance, when BABs changed the Energy Transfer animation, people were in furore. He HAD to make it longer, but people still hated it and asked "Well, can you at least make it so I don't look at my fists in amazement?" "Sure, I can do that." he responded, and indeed in the next patch, that's what it was. When Castle makes changes to powers and powersets, he's very upfront about what he can't give us, but also about what he CAN and generally goes with whatever we pick. These people garner heat when people get burned, that much is obvious. But their approach to the community is "I know you guys don't like this, and maybe there are a few things we can tweak. Let's sit down and see what we can do."

Jack didn't do that. Whenever he spoke with us, he did so to basically tell us what had been decided, never to actually ask us how we liked it or if we wanted something changed. Obviously, the player base at large isn't suited for communal game development, but a GOOD developer needs to be able to take what people are telling him and figure out a good way to put it into the game. People tend to not know HOW the things they want should be implemented, but they very much do know WHAT they want.

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.

thats a pretty accurate statement, he made various comments, especially towards the end, if you put them together, his vision of an ideal MMO is CO

I don't remember the specific time line, but this state of affairs persisted what felt far too long. What I do know is that this was where I started soloing, because being a sidekick who was even just -1 to foes on a team was pretty rough under the regime, and being -2 was right out. That broke teaming badly, and so I soloed in order to feel like I was achieving something. When they finally fixed it, I still soloed a lot; the experience strongly shaped my long-term approach to the game.

4) Emmert was lead dev over periods with the largest populations that CoH/V had and also saw the most additions / changes to the game.

With fewer changes and a smaller population (less than 194k or so, which was CoH/V's largest recorded player base), there were less materials with which to build a fire. Positron hasn't had to announce that many unpopular decisions, although there certainly have been some - hello, AE changes - while it's pretty unlikely that War Witch will announce, "Wholesale changes to all defensive powers incoming! Plus all mobs are getting buffed and CoH/V's new sub price is $30 a month!".

Of course, she may now do so just to spite me. ;-)

People like to disparage him, but it was during Emmert's time that CoH/V was its most successful in active account terms. Since Positron took over all these popular changes to CoH/V haven't seen players flooding back in large numbers. So those on these forums are those likely to agree with at least some of the current direction, while those who didn't have since gone.

So, see you all again in about 3 months when we run this thread topic again?

My second was a Katana/Regen Scrapper; I have yet to rebuild him after ED and the change that made Instant Healing a click power -- I had built the character as much as possible around regeneration as a hands-off defensive set, focusing on learning where the line was between getting faceplanted by incoming damage in the first five seconds of a fight and being able to hang on long enough to start dropping enough opponents for his regeneration to breast the tide of incoming damage, loading his attacks with damage and using Focused Accuracy to compensate... and then the whole playstyle got ripped out. Since then, I've toyed with going back and rebuilding him, but since Willpower has proved to be the 'fire-and-forget' secondary, I haven't had much interest in rebuilding him.

If its one thing both Venture and Jack have in common, its not sweet talking. I'd say they are both right often enough to pay attention to, wrong often enough to pay close attention to, and annoying enough that everyone paying attention is bound to be pissed off most of the time.


Game development, especially MMO development, isn't usually a clear cut case of "right" and "wrong." A lot of people don't like to play WoW. Does that mean the developers are "wrong?" Well, when five billion, nine hundred ninety million people on Earth don't play your game, and ten million do, we call that "raging lunatic success." Could they do better? Sure, except no one on Earth has actually proven its possible yet.

Everything the devs do will be attractive to some people, and not attractive to others. If they gave away free ponies to every player, some would complain about the smell. That doesn't mean everything they do is right, or there's literally *no* reference for objective criticism, its just that there's two orthogonal independent scales on which to judge the devs, and people usually are only using one. There is the scale where we judge give what they were aiming for how close did they get, and there's the scale where we judge given the target audience of the change how statistically attractive is the change.

The devs are usually only unambiguously wrong when they a) aim for X, and hit its opposite Y and b) they say its for a target group A and nobody in A is likely to want it. That's "really, really wrong." But its trickier to judge most things because they are more fuzzy. A lot of people didn't want loot or markets. A lot of people *still* wish the game didn't have loot or markets. That doesn't mean the devs were wrong to add them. They stated a bunch of goals for the invention system and the markets, and for the most part they hit them. And they intended to broaden the appeal of the game for both the existing player population and future newer players. They seem to have done that as well. *Some* players didn't like it, but the target was never "make sure every single existing player likes it." The target was "more people like it now than before, including hopefully a majority of the existing players" and that is probably true. The players who didn't like it, and perhaps don't like it? Unfortunately, to put it bluntly, they were and are acceptable losses when you design an MMO long-term. All those people *know* the devs were wrong, but the devs were not wrong, they just weren't targeting them.

Some people think the reason why the devs were not "wrong" to add the invention system was because more people wanted it than didn't. But that's a very oversimplified viewpoint: sometimes the devs are right even when most of the players are in opposition. Sometimes they know there will be strong opposition, but they believe its in the best long term interests of the game. ED is an example, and I think at least in broad terms the devs were proven right (which is not to say there weren't better technical ways to achieve the same goal).


Sometimes Jack was just plain wrong. Certainly, when it came to what his own game was doing, he wasn't often right. But when it came to big design decisions, its a lot fuzzier to criticize him. Was he wrong to target the difficulty levels and teaming situations he did? In retrospect its easy to say so, but its more correct to say that Jack made an easy to make mistake: he assumed that the casual players that wanted it differently would be gone in a year, and the more dedicated ones that had any chance at all of sticking around wanted and needed a different kind of game. And its easy to second guess that decision now, but back then it was a complete roll of the dice.

If Jack had completely gotten his way, its possible you and I wouldn't be here anymore. But someone else probably would be. We will never know if that group of people - who deserved a superhero game to play just as much as we do - would have been bigger. I doubt it, but I can't prove it.

After six years, its fair to say any competent dev team will be weighting the needs of their long-term players somewhat higher than the needs of newer players, because they have a very strongly established community. But after six months, or even a year? We were nobody special yet and the devs had an obligation to continue to target the widest possible group of potential future players they thought would eventually be playing this game. Many of the Champions Online and Star Trek Online players (and every other playerbase that follows a game from beta to launch) just don't get that. They feel that because they followed a game into launch they have a most-favored nation status among all people in the world: they are more important than the people not subscribing. But the reality of MMOs seems to be that no matter what the dev team does, most of those people won't be around in a year or two. If you focus solely on the vocal elements of your launch base, you'll become very quickly insular. That is not conducive to long-term subscriber health.


I think Jack was too transparent in reacting negatively to players who presented themselves as knowing how to make a game better than he did. He did, keep in mind, get this game launched from a point where CoH could have been one of those stories we tell about how a game development imploded from a pile of unrealized good ideas and never saw the light of day. Its *possible*. I have clients that pay a lot more than $15 that I don't let tell me how I'm doing my job all wrong.

But really, its more that Jack didn't have that thing public speakers are supposed to have, where they play what they are saying in their own heads, and make sure they aren't saying something confusing, ambiguous, or dumb. Public speakers know what I'm talking about: you can be unscripted yet precise, unedited for content but edited for presentation. Honestly and eloquence are not mutually exclusive. Jack never seemed to know what he sounded like to average listener. We can debate the design skills of the man, but there's no debating his public communication skills. He doesn't have any. One on one, I think he's fine. At least, I never had a problem understanding him.

I dislike the Inventions system for my own reasons, but dislike for the system does not inherently lead to the belief that the system shouldn't exist. I dislike eating, for example (long story), but recognise the need for some such system. I can't point to the Inventions system and say "See, this? This is bad for the game!" It isn't, and it brought a lot of new people into the game. I wish it weren't necessary, but apparently it is, so what am I gonna' do?

But just because that decision and, moreover, ED, ended up benefiting the game in a big way, it doesn't mean that there weren't times when Jack was not proven dead wrong. A lot of cases are ambiguous, granted, but I still firmly hold that the I4 boss buff was one instance where the mistake is not in question. He tried to do something with this that players quite simply refused to stand for. The fact that this was not only rolled back completely, but that the notion of unsoloable bosses was scrapped forever stands to clear evidence, at least in my eyes, that whoever came up with this idea was very, very wrong. I think it was Jack, because it was an extension of his "vision" for the game.

I have to agree with this. I've said it many times before - HOW you say things is often as important as WHAT you say, and jack had the tendency to say things in a very, very bad way. I'm not a public speaker, but what I feel Jack lacked was any sense of situational awareness when it came to the community. Whenever you post something on these forums, you HAVE to think about how people will react to it, and he spent enough time with us to have at least a vague idea what our reactions would be. This doesn't even have to mean spinning the truth, just being aware of potential problems and addressing them before people whip themselves up into a fenzy.

I'd liken Jack's participation on the forums to carpet-bombing. He'd come, drop comments indiscriminately and then leave without looking back, leaving his moderators to clean up after him. And then he'd wonder why the place is so shot up and full angry, bitter people. I don't know what Jack was one-on-one, but his public communication skills were TERRIBLE. Again, a sly developer can at least try and convince people that he's really sorry about nerfing his characters and he's really trying to take care of them. A foot-in-mouth developer simply makes people feel like they don't matter and no-one cares about them. Even if this is actually the truth, you DO NOT allow people to feel that way unless absolutely necessary.

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.

Don't be so quick to laugh. The brouhaha surrounding ED really was out of the ordinary, both in intensity and duration.

But it also proves that Jack wasn't unbudging on his "vision" for the game, since the change was in fact rolled back. And I think that change might *not* have been rolled back, had the ability to neutralize bosses in missions with difficulty sliders existed. In fact, the straw that broke the camel's back wasn't that the bosses were hard, it was that you could be surprised by them in ways that no amount of skill (except the skill of memorizing spawn points) could save the player, such as a mezzing boss right around the corner or worse front-loaded bosses at the start of the mission that killed you as you zoned. You can't "Nintendo" your way out of mezzing boss designed to two-shot blasters.

But his vision of a boss that was stronger than the current bosses, that players can be tested against, lives on in this new-fangled construct we call "Elite Bosses." And you can't always completely downscale them out of a mission. But they are mostly considered acceptable because of their frequency and context. Jack simply went too far with the boss buff, but clearly he also realized he went too far - eventually.

He wasn't unyielding, but that doesn't mean he wasn't fully convinced of his own righteousness. Enough complaints from enough people did end up changing his mind, but just barely. He did end up listening to the community, but out of lack of options. If he'd listened to the community from the start, he'd have focused on a way to bring greater challenge to the game WITHOUT screwing over people who were happy with the existing level of challenge. And that's how he always operated. He envisioned changes with only his ideal target audience in mind, and the belief that the rest of us who didn't agree with him would either leave or undergo sudden inexplicable epiphany and realise he was right all along.

He designed THROUGH his own player base, not around it.

Elite Bosses were the right way to go. Unlike bosses, they are RARE, and they appear in special occasions that really DO demand greater challenge for narrative reasons. Bosses spawn frequently, at the end of practically every mission (which is why warning labels would have been more an insult than a "warning"), they spawn in regular spawns, they show up in the streets and hazard zones and very often spawn in pairs and more. Bosses are far too common for them to be made a really big threat. It's anti-climactic.

Difficulty settings were another good idea, both to make it harder and to make it easier. Designing special encounters with special enemies like the ITF was another good idea. There were and are plenty of good ideas, but Jack always defaulted to change the game for everybody first and only conceded to just add on to it when people complained. That's what bugged me about it, personally - he was too quick to change things to his own vision and too slow to think about what established habits he was trampling over.

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.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

It did?

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.

Since Jack had nothing to do with how the marketing of the game was done at that time i fail to see how it's relevant in any case.

I think this was it. Being the guy in charge of ED was not really something anyone could have recovered from. Comparing multiple trips back to the hospital to his having to die several time to overcome a Boss on his Nintendo DS was just the icing on the cake.

I think he more said the wrong thing or left himself open to misinterpretation than any actual changes he made to the game. That "no more nerfs" quote, in fact, was that he said there would be no more major changes to Power stats, while ED was a change in the base game structure itself, the ATs and how Enhancements were slotted. He was technically correct since he wasn't changing any powers that he said he would not change. Of course, powers have been changed since, but I think that he also may have been talking about the inception of the "Cottage Rule", although not defined as such at that time.

I'll also say in his defense that as UnSub said, he was in charge during the most aggressive development of the early game, when many of the bugs and design flaws were being hammered out of the game. CoH also had a very tentative start, being as the original CO-like open powers design had been scrapped for ATs, throwing away a good half of the game's design phase. This left a lot of work that still needed to be done after release, although that's proven true for Cryptic's other games since. (And is probably true of MMOs in general)

I think a lot of the problems surrounding powers and Geko's animations is that originally the game was never intended to have powers that could be fired back to back with nothing but a cooldown timer and Endurance to limit them. The original system consisted of a dramatically smaller number of attacks, which could never have resulted in an attack chain. Thus, people would have been sitting around doing nothing for long periods waiting for attacks to recharge.

The problem is, this was flung up against Jack's "vision", and the actual gameplay style that developed once the players got ahold of it. Jack, as with most of his current games, wanted a constant interaction, console-type experience where you were constantly pressing buttons. And the players wanted an attractive, seamless graphic experience in which one animation flowed naturally into the next. Geko's original graphic design, which was intended for the open powers system, ended up being bashed to fit that vision. And it was bashed badly.

I agree that a lot of it was due to the devs not realizing that they SHOULD have gone back and redesigned a system based on cast time, damage, and recharge, not just damage and recharge. And they should have REALIZED they should have realized it. But the problem was also that the devs didn't have TIME to go back and redesign the system. Which is why we have so many reused animations, many of them used inappropriately for the amount of damage they do.

I think they originally possessed a delusion I saw on a mass scale during the pre-beta CO boards. The Champions/HERO powers system is *incredibly* broken in terms of strict mathematical balance. Anyone who thinks otherwise is numerically illiterate. However, a lot of people *think* its balanced because it seems so during gameplay. They fail to realize that most of the "balance" within the game comes not from the intrinsic balance of the system but rather from the options the system gives to GMs to counter most player attempts to break the system. In fact, it was one of the first PnP gaming systems I ever saw that actually *specified* repeatedly just where the dangerous areas of the system were.

Of course, all PnP systems (with any sense at all) have such warnings to GMs, but the Champions system seemed very specifically conscious of the numerical problems in their system. In D&D, you have warnings to GMs about teleportation and wishes, in Champions you have warnings about stacking resistance and defense. I say again: stacking resistance and defense.

Fortunately, for almost everything a player can do, there is a way for the GM to throw situations at the player that prevent them from making a mess of the combat in the game. And a smart GM will make sure combat is not the singular focus of every session, so even if you can obliterate everything in the game that won't necessarily solve the problem at hand. Put simply, Champions isn't balanced its rich and its richness arms players and GMs alike with ways to keep each other in check.

And players *want* to keep each other in check, most of the time. GMs and players - at least to some degree most of the time - are trying to cooperate to make gaming sessions fun and lasting. There is a social dynamic to human beings having to face each other that tends to suppress the worst abuses. Having the strongest killing attacks is usually not worth losing friends over.

In a computer MMO, neither of those dynamics exist. And without it, nearly all PnP game systems shatter. City of Heroes was created with a PnP mentality that balanced gaming systems aren't hard, because practically every PnP game system is at least workable. But when you turn it over to a computer, all bets are off. A gaming system gets *better* when you hand it to a good human GM to use. It gets *worse* when you hand it to a computer to operate. So unless you start from near perfection, you'll end up with hash.


Now, to an extent their really horrible numerical design had unexpectedly good side effects (depending on your point of view) including accidentally backing into a game that practically anyone can solo with anything. But we must never forget that that was a side effect. There were and are still serious negative consequences to those bad decisions that we still live with today. It is very difficult to design things that are hard but not ridiculously so; things that are not easily for some and impossible for others; things that don't just throw huge numbers at the players and dare them to overcome them with purely huge numbers in return. The game mechanics are simply *impossible* to balance in a straight forward manner without resorting to incredibly complex trickery, and even then its often too difficult to be practical.

With only a few mostly reasonably exceptions, there isn't any linear math anywhere within the Champions Online systems: its all proportional math. Someone learned their lesson at least in that sense. Here, its almost entirely linear math and that linear math is the singular most powerful bane of the entire powers design team. And because players are so accustomed to it, its virtually impossible to rip out and replace. And that will forever limit the places our game can go.

That "gameplay may change" warning on the box? In the grand scheme of things, its mostly worthless. Some things, even in an always evolving MMO, you only get one chance to get right. After that, if you're lucky you only get second chances to make it less wrong.


Now, there is one thing that I can pin on Jack. He actually believed that even if the game's numbers and mechanical systems were "less than optimal" it wouldn't matter because the players he believed he was targeting wouldn't care. *Some* would try to munchkin the system, but most wouldn't. He believed that players would want to *explore* the game rather than attempt to *exploit* the game. Again, just like humans do in better PnP sessions.

The problem is that he knew, or should have known, that he would never have the resources to make the massive blizzard of content you'd need to satisfy the "explorer" personality. The game would always come down, even for casual players, to figuring out ways to improve their characters and develop them, and that meant often finding new ways to improve performance. Even casual players would do this on some small level, nowhere near the min/maxers, but still.

You might get away with that sort of thing in a game like Star Trek Online, if they devote enough content resources to development. But that was simply never going to happen here. This game needed, or rather could have greatly benefited, from a properly designed and balanced playing field within which to design focused and targeted content. I don't think Jack ever, and perhaps to this day, fully appreciates that fact. I believe he thinks that the script is more important than the camera work. Which it might be, but that doesn't excuse leaving the lens cap on.

If there's one thing I wish I could wave a magic wand and grant to the devs, its a better set of design tools. Its hard to blame Geko then and the current devs now for some of the oddities I see in the powers system, when my spreadsheets are better than theirs much of the time. Heck: it took a player (Stupid_Fanboy) to realize that the discounts Geko said were in Claws were not in Claws, and with the sort of spreadsheet analysis just about every Scrapper min/maxer does regularly such an error is easily detectable today. Today, if the devs say a powerset obeys a certain set of rules and it doesn't, ten players will be there to point that fact out the same day.

Knowing how Castle and the powers team design powers, its a wonder Explosive Blast doesn't occasionally play fart animations** and cause it to rain Total Focus-sized DoT.



** Strictly speaking, that would be a BaB error

This made me LOL in a friendly way.

Being a game developer is a surreal experience. It's fun, stressful, and potentially rewarding. So is being a commercial loan officer, a waiter, or--perhaps most similar--a policy person for a government program (don't ask how I know).

It might seem like players screeching about something won't affect you, but it does. It's no different than working at a bank and having customers yell at you. And then send an email to your manager with your name and a list of the ways you made their experience more awful. And the fact that game developers can spy on every conversation you have in game (you DID know that right?) means they overhear a lot of negative things you may not be aware of, and may even be aware of some of the hypocritical things you post about deleting certain characters or "never using xyz powerset again."

Game development is a job. You get email, go out for drinks with coworkers, have office conflicts, and yes, evaluate how customers are reacting to your product. If anyone reading thinks the comments we make on these boards don't end up on internal power point slides and pasted to the wall of people's cubicles, let me assure you that not only does that probably happen, but the developers also probably go home to their spouses and complain/make fun of some of us by name. Every work environment is different but being a game developer isn't significantly different than other kinds of jobs.

Of course, you go into this line of work with expectations about dealing with complaints; actually coping with them is a skill in itself. One of the most eye opening experiences for me was the first time I got a meeting request from a coworker that was simply titled Protection from Danger spell (spell name changed to protect identities). I had no idea what the meeting was about; imagine my surprise when it turned out to be an angry diatribe about how this spell was horribly overpowered and this person had a graph to "prove" it!

All of this said, I've never met Jack E. My instinct (frequently wrong) tells me that he is an extremely strong willed person who is able to fight the fight necessary to build a game, but is not particularly good at evolving his concepts to what players want to play, or, especially, explaining why changes are being made.

Players put a lot of trust in you as a developer; it doesn't mean you should always go along with what they say, but you have to develop an understanding of why they are saying it. Sometimes game developers get lost in charts and tables and "balance" and lose sight of the fun that keeps people coming back. Game developers are also notoriously bad at evaluating how powerful an enemy or power is because they encounter the game in an entirely different context, where they are able to instantly access powers, skills, and areas, making the game seem much easier than it actually is. I'm not saying that's what happened to Statesman for sure, but it does sound like a lot of players felt that way about his approach.