MMOgrinder reviews City of Heroes

Other games seem to, or at least they used to, be designed around allowing players to spend the most time as possible accomplishing as little as the players would tolerate. In other words, a time sink.

When you bill someone for time, as is the case with monthly subs, this makes sense from a money making perspective. Remember the Simpsons episode where Homer calls the sports tips 1-900 number, and the recording rambles very, very slowly.

This is what some games essentially do by having your character slowly waddle across the landscape on fetch and deliver quests. Travel speed is a way of keeping players from blowing through content, leveling too fast and in short, doing too much and growing bored.

CoH has thankfully avoided this approach to design for much of the game, and many of the parts they didn't originally have been removed or reworked over the years with QA changes.

Hour for hour, still I think you can do more in CoH than in the 900lbs gorilla. Modern titles have gotten away from being as time-sinky too, so that just shows one way CoH was progressive.



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Here's another one that's actually a be careful what you wish for one. The unnamed lightsaber game, like many MMOs, have progressive missions: you do X, and then that leads you to Y, and then that leads you to Z, all as part of a single mission. The problem is that chain cannot be shortcutted. So if you are doing a multipart mission and your team has already done X and Y, and then you invite a friend, he might not be able to get any credit for anything while you guys do Z.

Heck, the idea of progressive missions sounds great: I love them. But think about missions like the Praetorian one where you have to pick roses for Agent White. Those roses don't turn into blinkies *until* you get that mission. Suppose it had a prereq. You do the prereq, then invite a friend. Now, imagine if you saw and could click the blinkies, but he couldn't. Furthermore, because he can't click them, he can't make progress on that mission. So when you do, you get part B, and he doesn't, and then while he can still team with you, he's no longer getting credit for anything that happens (he gets XP and drops, but no mission credit).

That actually happens in unnamed lightsaber game. So much so I've been on many teams that invite someone and then backtrack specifically to let the new guy catch up, so they don't leave him behind, which means hunting the same things again, or redoing other tasks again for his benefit.

And sometimes you can't even see those task objectives highlighted anymore, so you either have to let him lead - even though he might be new and not exactly know how to do the tasks you just did efficiently - or you have to have memorized the tasks so you can lead him back to them.

By our standards, this isn't just hostile to teaming, this is a deliberate attempt to assassinate teaming. But that's what passes for teaming in other MMOs: its practically medieval by our standards. Its genuinely amazing how different casual teaming is in CoH compared to many other MMOs. Its actually easier to jump into our end game than it is to get onto any normal team in some MMOs.

True story: I heard this at least a dozen times while playing a recently released MMO set a long time ago in a galaxy far far away:

When do we get sprint? lol

Answer: around level 15.

Gets better: you first get something resembling an actual travel power around level 30ish. And its a vehicle and you have to buy it. And its not cheap.

It takes somewhat longer to get to 30 there than here. So its not an insignificant amount of time without travel. If the devs did that to us the players would set fire to Zwillinger's hat while his head was still occupying it.

I 100% agree on this.



That's part of it. For a short time I was actually a not particularly successful volunteer developer for a pay-to-play MUD, and we had a lot of rules around travel. Although it was a text based game with "rooms" you could cross through instantly, we would put obstacles like ferries, gondolas, and other things you had to wait on into the game to slow players down intentionally.

One particular set of islands was only available by a boat that came around once an hour or so, and the ride to the islands took 30 to 45 minutes, longer if your boat was attacked by pirates and you didn't bother to or couldn't fight them off. Since this was a text based game, all these "boat rides" technically just consisted of entrances and exits that only were available every so often, along with flavor text to suggest you were traveling.

The stated reason for it was less to create time sinks specifically as it was to make the world feel large and like each zone feel like a distinct place. Part of our developer's handbook basically said we should limit teleportation and fast travel type powers because they can make the game world feel unconnected. Isolating a zone also tended to create the sense of seperate, distinct communities of players around the game world, a concept almost completely absent from most MMOs.

But sometimes the reason it takes so long to move around is just one or more of following (some of which applied to my previous engagement):

- lots of games brag about how "vast" they are in terms of geographic size/number of rooms, and players view this is a mark of quality

- many games oversize their zones on purpose to give players enough room to "hunt" outdoor enemies without tripping over each other

- multiple players within short distances of each other eats up more processing time and causes visual clutter, so efforts are made to spread them out (e.g. putting shops far away from each other)

- developers figure that powers that speed up players can be made available as perks or spells later

- open world PVP and instant travel do not mix well

To a large extent, I feel this is a question of perception and psychology in a game design sense, but it's deceptively simple yet fiendishly clever psychology. In your typical "loot drops, everybody rolls" MMO, you can see what dropped, you can see it's exactly what you need... But someone else gets it. It's just about as close as you can get to feeling that someone took your stuff without someone literally taking stuff from your inventory. You fought for this, it dropped, you deserve it, yet someone took it from you. I've seen the amount of anger this has induced in a WoW-playing friend of mine, especially when he rolled 97, celebrated, and then someone else rolled 98. Ouch.

Our system is subtly but importantly different - stuff falls directly in people's inventories. You get what you get, and if you don't get the stuff you were shooting for, it's no-one's fault in particular. Sure, you might curse your luck, the RNG or the game's encounter design, but you don't feel contempt for your players. They didn't take anything from you. A lot of the time you don't even know what they got if they don't announce it. This fosters an atmosphere of camaraderie such that oftentimes if people get something you need that they don't, they'll outright offer to give it to you free of charge. I've had people hand me things they thought I could use and I've handed out things others needed that I would have simply sold on the Market.

I like how the whole collection of design decisions that make up City of Heroes conspire to create a game that gives you almost no sense of competition with any of your fellow players. No-one's taking anyone's stuff, no-one's beating anyone else and everyone's fighting for the same goal. When one player succeeds, it means success for all players involved. That's pretty much exactly the kind of atmosphere I really adore.

I don't think this is a bad idea in spirit, but I do have kind of a problem with it, especially within the context of a persistent sandbox game. MUD and PNP players are hardy fold that don't just endure adversity, they welcome it. Not all gamers are like this, however. Many (if not most) don't really appreciate discomfort and the atmosphere it builds. Many times in sandbox games we're out and out told to go somewhere and accomplish a specific task. Getting there once through high adventure and mortal danger is actually pretty fun. Getting there for the tenth time, however, becomes a drag. The adventure loses its lustre, the danger takes its toll and people simply run out of patience.

I feel the reality is that not that many people get into games to experience the same kind of hardship that defines real life. I don't really have a problem with it, personally. Hell, look up an old game called Deus (NOT Deus Ex), which starts with your character robbed of all his possessions and kicked down a slope into an alien wilderness where he has to survive ala Robinson Crusoe. It's a good game (OK, it's a crappy game, but I appreciate the idea) and all, but it's really not a genre that's very popular. Which you can probably tell because you've never heard of this game, nor any others like it.

What you have to remember with a persistent open-world sandbox is that the game cannot exist without the meta-game. You CANNOT keep players immersed for anywhere near the duration that players are expected to play them. Sooner or later, you have to account what happens when players get bored and burn out, what happens when players replay the game a dozen times, what happens when the game ages greatly and so forth. From a game perspective, forced hardship builds immersion. From a meta-game perspective, it represents one more reason to resent the game once the the stars in the eyes of a brand new player have faded away.

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.

CoX scales every single mission that is an instance to the number of players in the group, so even if you *dont* have a full 8, you will still get a sensible number of mobs for the number of players in the team.

It has the potential to make it more fun, but it can also end up being "oops, forgot the mission settings were for +4 x8, lets drop it a bit"... which has happened to me more often than not when i team with some people.

On the flip side, pretty much every other single MMO doesnt scale according to the number of players in the party, and they generally only instance for dungeons and raids, so if someone cannot do a quest by themselves, add in another person and more often than not, the quest then becomes easy enough.

Swings and roundabouts, there is no perfect system out there.

That's because they've been brainwashed by previous MMOs.

Now that you can get a travel power at level 4, it is much better. IMO, you should be able to pick one at character creation or at least level 2, but oh well.

Funnily enough, the Ouro portal was probably the biggest thing that made me feel like an Incarnate when I ran Mender Ramiel's story arc. Sure, the subsequent Incarnate powers are cool, but being sent to talk to the Statesman was a bit special. I'm told to go there, I walk over to the Ouro exit and BOOM! I'm in Independence port, and not far from the Statesman's ship. I speak with him, he collapses, I toss down an Ouro portal besides him and walk away. BOOM! I'm back in Ouroboros within shouting distance or Ramiel. Now THAT'S cool!

The thing with heroes in most movies, games and stories in general is that they're limited in some way, and usually in fairly trivial ways. You need to get to a city, but it's across the sea, so you need a ship. You need to get inside a catacomb, but the door is locked and you need a key. You have to dive to the bottom of the ocean, but you can't breath, so you need a submarine. This goes on and on. It's actually not so much the big powers that make me feel "godlike" so much as the little ones. Like being immune from disease or being able to fly or being able to breathe underwater or not needing to eat and sleep and so forth.

This, really, is where most Peasant MMOs lose me. They work so hard to make my life as a medieval adventurer as **** as it would have been if I were actually living in medieval Europe during the dark ages, only there really were dragons and wizards and undead, that the end result is a thousand niggling little humiliations that just turn me off of the experience. Why do I have to walk everywhere? Why do I have to use someone else's smithy? Why do I have to wear a particular kind of armour? Why is my character always smaller than my enemies? Why must I waste my time "mining" when that's not a glamorous adventurer's job? It's like they're less about a life of high adventures and glorious combat and more about the life of a peasant getting through the day.

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.

Not sure that's 100% true. Scanner missions were considered a godsend to casual players and content farmers alike in that they were ways to informally team with people, level out of content gaps, or just do a few quick and dirty missions when time was limited. They are by design very simple (simplistic really) and not the sort of content I would hold up as representing our game well, but its a necessary evil of sorts that the players generally appreciate.

I think it's less of not putting on a trailer directly and more of not minding if a reviewer brought it up in a review. Pretty much the difference between "hey, that game has a robust crafting system despite some quirks" and "whoa, mining for crafting materials takes HOURS dude".

My Arcs
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Mission Architect Handyman

What I meant though is that there are lots of relatively mundane parts of a game I would not put in an advertising video, but are nonetheless things the players generally appreciate. I don't think its a good design rule to only make what is visually marketable, which the quote I was responding to seemed to be implying.