Discussion: A City of Heroes Retrospective - Part I

This was technologically the most exciting issue for me. Joe has hit upon something that oftentimes gets lost when people talk about Issue 14: The concept of user-generated content within an MMORPG was practically non-existent in a major title before City of Heroes did it. That's always been one of my pet peeves with games, is that sure, playing through someone else's content is fun and all, but what if I want to tell my story?

If I had one criticism, it wouldn't be about the whole farming/bugged enemies/"AE babies" thing. This was a new technology, and I fully expected there to be bumps in the road. I really wish everyone else had understood that at launch and not been so quick to exploit the hell out of them.

No, instead, I'd say that I'd like to see more integration between AE and the game. What I especially have in mind is for the devs to take some of the stories out of AE and actually set up contacts that give the missions out. In fact, what I think would be really neat is if they held themed contests. For example, "Create your best stories about the war happening in Croatoa!" Let it run for a month or two. At the end, the developers pick five or six of the best arc, plop a contact in Croatoa, and give out the missions. Or maybe a "Design a newspaper mission!" contest. Or a "Tell Paula Dempsey's backstory!" contest, with several of the arcs being added to her mission list.

If players felt like they were contributing to the game in more than an off-to-the-side kind of way, I think its popularity would explode.

As for my personal favorite issue, being an old fart, I'm going to have to go WAAAAAY back and pick Issue 2: A Shadow of the Past. We take all of this stuff for granted these days because it's all been around so long, but before Issue 2, there were no badges. No one wore capes or had auras. There was no Hollows, Eden, or Shadow Shard. There were no respecs--if you wanted to change your powers, you had to re-roll. There were no exemplars--if you missed doing Synapse's task force when you were level 20, too bad! People could grief you by teleporting you off of buildings. You had to go through the tutorial, whether you wanted to or not. There was no /hide command for when you wanted to play quietly without interruption. And one of my favorites, they increased the influence trade limit from 9,999 to 99,999. Yes, that's right kiddos, you used to not be able to trade more than 9,999 influence at a time! I remember holding contests where the grand prize was never over 100,000 influence or so, because if you won, it was more tedious to sit there and continuously accept trade invites and confirmations than it was just to go out and earn the stuff.

So as a player, I would definitely have to rate Issue 2 as my favorite issue. The quality of life improvements were just so monumental, the badges and new zones were shiny new and exciting (anyone here remember their jaw droppping upon their first foray into the Shadow Shard?), and the game became orders of magnitude more fun.

Dark_Respite's Farewell Video: "One Last Day"
THE COURSE OF SUPERHERO ROMANCE CONTINUES!
Book I: A Tale of Nerd Flirting! ~*~ Book II: Courtship and Crime Fighting - Chap Nine live!
MA Arcs - 3430: Hell Hath No Fury / 3515: Positron Gets Some / 6600: Dyne of the Times / 351572: For All the Wrong Reasons
378944: Too Clever by Half / 459581: Kill or Cure / 551680: Clerical Errors (NEW!)