March 2011 Producer's Letter

Several of us had the good fortune recently to partake of an all-expenses-paid luxury excursion to PAX East in Boston (just call us the Jet Set). We had a fantastic time meeting players at the meet and greet on Friday night, and of course the Panel on Saturday morning is always a lot of fun for us. Unfortunately, Matt “Positron” Miller was ill Saturday morning and none of us rolled Emp Defender, so Matt had to sit out the panel. (Matt thanks everyone for their well-wishes and of course for attending the panel, even though he wasn’t able to make it).

Food poisoning aside, we had a great time at our PAX East panel. When we arrived we were greeted with an excited and eager line of fans raring to get in (check out this pic from CoH player @ransim - http://twitpic.com/48t87i ). It was great to see everyone positive and excited about what we were presenting, and there was in particular a lot of cheering and applause over the announcement of the upcoming Global Server List. It’s no surprise that this announcement was extremely well received, as a Global Server List has been a common request for quite a while now, and recent consolidation of our server operations has finally made this possible. This also opens the potential for additional database optimizations in the future, which will benefit everyone in the long run.

Because the European players are very important to us, we wanted to provide you with an even larger pool of players to give your community the opportunity to grow and the chance to make new friends from across the globe. We’re anticipating that a number of people will stop in to say hello (and, of course, make some characters in the new slots available). I know I’m looking forward to having a chance to practice my laughably rusty French.

We know that your online and in-game identities are important. City of Heroes is at its heart a game about who you are, not just what you do. We’ve all spent the last 7 years forming friendships, alliances, and rivalries in City of Heroes, and we know that anything that can impact your in-game identity can be a reason for concern. At the same time, to make this server list change happen, we need to ensure your identity remains unique from other players. We did a lot of data mining and found that pre-pending the names of EU accounts affected the fewest active players (the difference is hundreds vs thousands).

We want the process by which this happens to be very clear for everyone. We considered a number of solutions to the identity collision challenges presented by Global Server Access, and many of these options were quite complex and potentially confusing. Because we have to communicate the process to a number of players in multiple languages, and make it clear enough so everyone knows exactly what to expect, we chose the most direct route we could while disrupting the fewest players. At the same time, a more widespread solution such as pre-pending every European player’s global name, even if there was no collision, may have been clearer, but was too intrusive. To be clear, this solution affects no character names and affects a very small number of players’ account and global names.

Complex solutions introduce risk, as well, and we want to increase the chances that the necessary disruption to your play experience will happen one time, and not be drawn out or risk your game data.

I know the feeling of seeing someone else with your name. A year ago I transferred my original main character from Victory to Virtue. I lost the character name matching my global name in the transfer. A few months ago, I happened to log into Atlas Park standing next to the character who had my old name (what are the odds?). He actually offered to give up the character name when I mentioned it to him, but I didn’t want to do that to someone else.

We have been listening to your feedback carefully here at Paragon Studios, and Zwillinger, Avatea, and Beastyle have done a fantastic job of representing your concerns. We loved the suggestion to let people reactivate old accounts to reduce the number of shared names between regions. We’ll definitely make that happen for you shortly before we change over to the Global Server List.

In the meantime, we are very excited about Issue 20 launching next week! The Incarnate System has been a long time in development, and we know it brings some new depth to your long-established characters. In the interest of helping you set up your characters right to take advantage of the Incarnate powers--and tune a build for the Incarnate Trials--we will be offering a free respec with the issue launch. We will also be giving you a free repsec with the Anniversary celebrations at the end of April, as well, so no need to hoard it, either!

When is Issue 21 coming out?

But seriously, I can't wait for I20 - beta testing is never quite the same as punching Praetorians on the live servers

*curses the fact that his gaming computer is sitting in a storage container making its way across the Atlantic Ocean*

Heh! I called it! I knew they weren't going to wait for the Anniversary!

I'm off Mon-Thurs! Gonna get me some new Incarnate Powers!!

Mr. Second Measure,
daaahhhling...
Would you mind posting in a larger font? and, NOT bolded? please?

I now have an eyestrain headache, and aspirin really doesn't sit well with coffee.

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The best part about the line was when the enforcers showed up for line games and to give out goodies. Someone near us yelled out the character name ArachnObama, I don't even remember the context but we were laughing about it till we went in.

The meet and greet itself was a blast, I know I personally had fun talking to you guys and poking around on the machines connected to Beta to oooh and aaah over the new Incarnate slots and their customization. Also had fun being able to prod you guys with random questions, like why Statesman isn't in the final mission for Tin Mage. I've been sharing that bit of unofficial history with people.

Briefly, basically there was originally meant to be a cut scene that showed States basically in Praetoria alone and being beaten by Cole. But due to time constraints it never made it in. It was a fun conversation with Posi and a unique insight into the story I wouldn't have known otherwise. I always just assume States was being a jerk because of his worry about tapping the wells power to much. Makes more sense overall that he'd have charged ahead and got beaten.

I think I'm going to take a much needed sanity day from work when i20 goes live.

Next week next week, as in APR 4-8, or some weird fiscal next week, meaning APR 11-15?

My suggestion for the names situation would be to do the same thing CoH pre-orders did for people in the 1 month open beta. Everyone had to make sure their 1st character was the one that held the name you wanted reserved for yourself when it hit live, except this time make it the top five. Also allow people the option of using the same name multiple times, speaking for myself I could tell you I'd most likely only have 4 names I'd want to actually keep while the others are usually just spin offs of my mains. I really don't see anyway around globals other than adding a 1 if that name happens to already be taken, a global rename should be offered as well in case they are like me and can't stand a name with numbers in it.

As for the topic of extended maintenance, I lost a lot of important stuff myself. Incarnate shards, expensive IO's, and 50+ million in infamy. I can only imagine how large scale this incident really is...If it can't be fixed I think everyone should receive a free set of purples/pvp io's. Seriously though we'll need some sort of compensation...

Woohoo Issue20!

well done team, been waiting for this !!

Hold on one Incarnate-shard pickin' moment- Global Names were going to have characters dropped off of them, but this letter says that they're now going to be prepended with EU, same as the account names (since noone really cares what happens to those)?

Is this the case, or am I misreading things?

Launching next week? Are you ignoring all the negative feedback about the inf costs and other concerns with the new incarnate system and launching it the way it presently is?

I think i have to post this here as well.

In 16 successful trail runs (8 of each trial) you WILL have enough threads/componets/merits to craft 2 tier 2 boosts, and 2 tier 3 boosts, effectively finishing the new content, assuming you grab the incarnate shifts.

If you don't want to run the trials, but you want to unlock, and slot your new powers, it will take you about 390 shards, and about 460 million inf. Thats count converting shards into threads, and then converting threads into iXP, AND converting threads into common components. Now, while you could argue that 460 million inf is a lot, its really about 1.18million per shard, AND you can run the tin mage and apex and get 2 threads each from them, so the more tin mages and apex you run, the less shards you need to convert to threads, and you could save yourself even more money.

If you run the apex and tin mage everyday, and convert just 10 shards into 10 threads everyday, it'll take you about 28 days to fully unlock, and slot a t1 boost into all your newly unlocked slots.

4 weeks time to completely avoid the system. Or you can just run the trials...

Can we please start having announcements in the Annoucement section? I really have zero interest in a nine-paragraph piece of fluff. Especially considering how awful the font is.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Snow Globe I notice that you didn't mention anything about players being locked out of their NCsoft master accounts

I noticed that too. I suspect the position is "like it or lump it, we're done". Charming. Same as server list merge.

Let's hope they unbork the servers from todays maint before trying to do anything else.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Noyjitat Launching next week? Are you ignoring all the negative feedback about the inf costs and other concerns with the new incarnate system and launching it the way it presently is?

Apparently. I know a few people who won't take part in these new Raids. Too big, too unweildy, too grindy and they just won't have the inf to make the powers anyway.

Well done. You've annoyed a portion of your playerbase who've stuck with you over the years because you weren't like every-other-grindfest-MMO.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Radmind I have 2 toons, maybe 3 that will be partaking in the Trials and working toward the 4 new slots. If you are looking to have 10-20 lvl 50's having all the incarnate gear it's going to take a Very long time.

This game has always encouraged altitus. That's the point; they're turning from that to the standard "your main" view of other MMOs. Of my 20 or so 50s, I run 15+ on a regular basis. (Plus my lower level chars who will obviously add to my 50s.) I would 95% of the time bring what the team needs. I'm not unusual in that. With this grind I'm saying "I'm only doing this for badges, so I'm bringing my main if you don't like it, tough".

I do wish people would remember that this game has a huge variety of players and playstyles. Ignoring and marginalizing any segment is a dumb plan especially when the economic climate is such that this is an easy 'first to drop expense' if things are tight. It's ALWAYS easier to keep an existing customer than find a new one. It's better to get word of mouth recommendation than advertising. Ignoring the solo'ists/small teams/those who don't have the time to grind or who just can't handle Raid content isn't going to keep them or get a recommendation.