Intriguing Massively Article

What? An article about CoH that hasn't been redname reposted eight times here, with four face book posts, and eighteen tweets/seventy-eight retweets? Must be the weekend!

Personally, I see Going Rogue as a flop because, from my on-the-outside-looking-in observations suggest the whole thing was originally designed to be a giant end game system with Praetoria serving as the content, which was then retrofitted in the most bizarre system of content distribution I've ever seen: Some at the start, then raids at the end.

I don't know why this happened, but someone seemed to have gotten it into their head that raids are what would turn City of Heroes from a niche game into a monster, possibly arguing that successful MMOs have raids, thus City of Heroes should have them. Plus, look! People keep asking for them? Old arguments of being unable to keep content production up with content distribution that Jack and Matt themselves made eight years ago seem to have been either forgotten or ignored. By Matt's own admission, Incarnates were not supposed to be a bit of content, they were supposed to be a "system," kind of like how Inventions were.

My guess is that because Inventions proved so popular, our leads became convinced that if you give people more stuff to earn, they'll be perfectly happy to rerun the same small subset of content over and over again. That it took a full year before we even got through that... No, we do actually want story and we do actually want small-team content and we do actually want alternate paths that aren't a monumental grind is something I attribute to part of the misunderstanding.

I attribute the whole thing to someone in management being convinced that raids would be massively popular, enough to justify the huge budget of a full expansion, all pretty much just for that. Sure, it's more popular than bases and PvP, but it's probably around the level of popularity of playing villains - there was a peak of massive activity, which is down to about moderate interest now. It's enough to generate profit, but I don't think this was ever going to cause a massive boom of subscriptions and veteran returns.

Quote:

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.

Wow. What a garbage article. How did this get posted? It's not journalism, in the least. It's nonsense. No wonder it didn't have the cojones to tag it as City of Heroes.

I almost hope someone gets beaned in the head for this one. Nethergoat nailed this mess on the head, this is a ludicrous thing to see posted on any gaming website that fancies itself as 'journalism'.

I hate to post this because in doing so I admit that I sometimes read Massively, but their CoH correspondent never posts anything but off-key whines about a few minutiae of the game that he never acquired the capacity to accept. In that sense he seems like a great fit for the official forums and of course I'm kidding.