InfamousBrad on CoH/V's innovations

[UnSub]

Okay, this is a long c'n'p from the CoH/V forums, but I think that InfamousBrad's comments are worth repeating to a more jaded audience. I tend to agree with his points, but I'm interested to see what others' think.

From this thread:

One way in which I'm different from a lot of you is that my MMO gaming history is at serious right angles to most of you: I literally never played any of the "popular" MMORPGs. I didn't go from Everquest to World of Warcraft to here; I went from Anarchy Online to Neocron to Star Wars: Galaxies to here. So there are a lot of things that, I only recently came to understand, are literal standards of the MMO genre, things that almost no other MMO designer can think past or around, things that 90% of all MMO players think are mandatory parts of the MMO genre, that I had literally never been exposed to. Then I went and played Tabula Rasa. And when I started complaining bitterly about it, specifically about features that it shares with another (deceased) MMO called Auto Assault, only then did my friends get it through to me that nobody understood what I was complaining about, because everything I was complaining about was how MMOs just naturally are.

So during this last week of the year, let me take a break from my (honestly, increasingly bitter) arguments about some of the things I hate in this game, especially since issue 11, to thank the City of Heroes/City of Villains development team for a long list of things that they did right that are so, so much more creative and innovative, so much more ground breaking, than I ever gave them credit for.

No Attribute Points: In hindsight, I don't know how I failed to notice they were missing. But I never felt they added anything to the other games; they were one more way to accidentally gimp your character by not making the right choices. Attribute points are a hold-over from the earliest primitive editions of D&D, where every character had more or less the same armor and weapons and where your attribute points were the only customization there were. Where you got the guts to drop them completely from this design, and how you stuck to your guns when NCsoft management almost has to have leaned on you to put them in? I have no idea. But thank you for the courage. You removed some highly unnecessary complexity.

Ubiquitous Instanced Missions: When I started playing City of Heroes after coming here (in part) from Anarchy Online, I complained bitterly about the fact that roughly half of my missions were street sweeping missions. (Nearly all of Anarchy Online's missions are instanced. Or at least they used to be; Eris only knows what that game is like any more.) Only recently has anybody gotten it through my head just how rare instanced missions are in almost every other game, and how expensive they are to develop. Only literally just in the last week have I gotten it through my head that in almost every MMO in the history of the industry, you get maybe 1 instanced mission every other character level, on average over the course of your career, that 99% of the missions you get sent on are street sweeping missions.

Oh, and how did I forget to mention, at first, how amazing it is that your instanced missions adjust automatically to the character level? I took that for granted. Only in the last week did people get it through to me that fixed-difficulty instanced missions are something that the entire rest of the MMO industry takes for granted. The frustration of being given those missions 2 or 3 levels before your average player could complete them, and being told "if you can't complete the instance, go level up 2 more times and come back" is something that, bafflingly to me, the entire MMO industry does to its customers. Everybody, that is to say, but you. That's incredible. Thank you for getting that right.

But back to street sweeping for a second. Back when I started playing City of Heroes, I was complaining about street sweeping at a time when you'd cut the amount of searching all over the map for mobs of the right type and level in half already. Then you came out with City of Villains, where the amount of street sweeping dropped from half of all missions to maybe 5%. When I wrote my long list of broken missions in the level 20-25 range in CoV (and I still think that list is far too long, far longer than any other 5-level range in CoV), those "go street sweep against things 3 to 5 levels above you" missions that I complained about are, apparently, something that every player in every other MMO learns to take for granted will happen to them occasionally. Not knowing that, I didn't give you nearly enough credit for having figured out that you can come up with an equally time-consuming, equally fun, equally social game without that ugly feature. Thank you!

Flight: Right before I started City of Heroes, I remember watching a friend of mine cross the entire length of The Hollows ... with Hover. She was inordinately grateful to have that option at level 6; it was worth the interminable delay to her to not have to fight level 12 Igneous in Grendel's Gulch. And, like everybody else back then, she was designing her character around the assumption that she was going to take Flight or Super Jump at level 14. Nowadays, of course, all of the smarter players have Raptor Packs no later than level 8. In your game, no later than level 14, players who don't want to street sweep their way all the way to the mission door, going from enemy group to enemy group for a mile, against enemy groups that increase in difficulty to far above their level, can simply fly or jump up to the rooftop level and above and fly directly to the mission door. (A trick I used to also use in Anarchy Online starting at, if memory serves, level 20.) When mission doors are hidden in areas where the trees are grown together above them, making us thread ground-level mazes full of mobs, like in Perez Park or Primeva, some players, myself included, complain bitterly.

Only recently did I get it hammered into my head that almost every other MMO in the history of the genre considers the street sweeping your way a half a mile to a mile across the map, being forced to fight every spawn between point A and point B, to be the most important content in the game, to be an essential part of the MMO formula. That, I'm finally given to understand, and not the technical obstacles in 3D travel, is why other games are so resistant to flight. And I cannot thank you enough for having the courage to bet that you could continue to raise the development budget to replace all those endless hours of street sweeping with enough instanced missions to keep us playing for the same number of hours. No, really, no amount of thanks I could give you would be enough. Thanks!

Sidekicking and Exemplaring: A friend just pointed me to a blog in which a bunch of current and former MMO programmers are arguing about MMO design theory. And one of their most prominent articles, one they put a permanent sidebar link to, refers to the insoluble problem in all MMOs of what to do if you and a friend want to play together, but your friend has more time per week to play than you do? Pretty soon he's higher level than you; you can't survive his missions, and if he joins you for your missions, neither of you gets any XP. And I read that article, literally just the other day, with a kind of sick fascination. How could all these veterans of the industry not know that this problem got solved three and a half years ago?

And the funny thing is, an exemplar/sidekick system like yours is something that would be even easier to implement in every other MMO in the market. In every other game on the market, most of your combat stats are derived from character attributes that go up more or less linearly per level, and from the stats on equipment of whatever level you're using, which also increase more or less linearly per level. This means that for them, adding the ability to sidekick up to a friend's level, or exemplar down, could be added with not much more than one line of code, not counting the code to track distance between the mentor and sidekick. Because of the freeform power selection, City of Heroes has to memorize what order you picked your powers in, store that information as part of the character data, and adjust your power list on the fly as your level jumps up and down. (I do go back just barely far enough to remember when this didn't happen.) You went to the trouble of doing it, though. That's nothing less than amazing, now that I realize it.

That same game designers' blog insists that "the yellow exclamation point" (the yellow ring, in this game) that tells you that a contact has missions for you is the single greatest technological innovation in the history of MMO design. Garbage. The single greatest innovation in the history of MMO design is the sidekick/exemplar system, and because I didn't realize how revolutionary it still is, even three years after you introduced it, I didn't give you nearly enough credit for it. Thanks!

Cellphones: Because I didn't come to this game from an MMO that used contacts to give out missions (both Anarchy Online and Neocron use terminals that can be found everywhere to communicate with mission givers), I remember complaining bitterly in City of Heroes about how many times I had to run or fly all the way back to the contact before they would trust me with their cellphone number. I remember being extraordinarily grateful when you shortened that substantially in City of Villains, where almost every contact gives you their cellphone number after one mission for them, and most of the rest after two.

Only in the last week has somebody gotten it through to me that other games consider the travel time back to the contact, street sweeping your way the whole way back, to be an essential part of the content, just as I said about the need to walk everywhere, above. Which makes it almost ironic that the game that makes it possible for you to fly back to the contact instead of having to street sweep back to the contact is also the one that invented the in-game cellphone, that the game where it would be the least trouble to go back to the contact is the one that decided that it was still too much trouble. That was both innovative and incredibly generous of you. Thank you!

Extraordinary Forum: I never spent any amount of time on Anarchy Online's forums. Neocron, I remember, had very good forums. But when I blogged about Richard Garriott's bitter determination not to ever have an official forum for Tabula Rasa, only then did people point me to articles about the official forums in every other game, and why almost the entire remainder of the MMO industry wishes they had never turned theirs on. The horrific experiences I remembered from Anarchy Online and SWG, I had considered flukes, evidence of how malevolently awful and criminally stupid their customer service people were. Only now have I gotten it pounded into my head, by people who've played a lot more (and a lot bigger) MMOs than I have, how spoiled I am by the official forums for City of Heroes and City of Villains.

And here's the thing that really amazes me about this. I've played City of Heroes long enough now to have seen several lead moderators and several official community representatives disappear, to have to leave for personal reasons or to be poached away by other game companies. And every time it's happened, the entire player base held its breath, waiting for the inevitable decline into the same kind of horrific madness I remember from the SWG forums. But what happened instead, each and every time, is that the total unknown we got introduced to as a new forum moderator or as a new official representative to the community turned out to be at least as good as the old one, sometimes even better!

I've run enough online discussion groups and online communities in my life to know what a deft touch it takes. But online forums for these games bear a special burden: sometimes the official company rep to the forums has to tell people "no," and sometimes tell them "no" when they're good and thoroughly (and even sometimes not unreasonably) angry. There are ways to do this. At the very least, it takes someone who can get it across to people that they are being listened to, someone with the skill to actually hear, understand, and paraphrase back the complainers' arguments. Not many people involved in running MMO forums seem to realize just how important that one step is, that an awful lot of the anger comes not from people not getting what they want, but from people feeling like they're being held in contempt, that they're beneath the company's notice. There's also an entirely different tightrope to walk sometimes, and watching the moderators here do it taught me really how it's done. There's a gift, a skill, to telling people that the door isn't closed on their suggestion forever, to convincing them that the games' developers really are watching the game to see if the change the users are demanding is needed, that if actual evidence convinces the developers (somewhere down the road months from now) that the players were right that then the complaining players will get their way. Actually, that part is easy. The hard part is doing so without creating in the complainers the expectation that it's inevitable that they'll win.

I don't know where NCsoft is finding these people, or how they're taking ordinary moderators and community reps and training them to be this good. But only recently has anybody gotten it through to me just how rare and unusual this talent is, to what extent NCsoft has a near monopoly on it. And it's important to both the quality of the game and the quality of the relationship between us customers and you the company, it's the source of an awful lot of the goodwill between us. So again, thank you for making it look so easy that I never appreciated just how unusual and amazing you were being.

- - - - -

Don't get me wrong. There are still things that I don't like about City of Villains, mostly balance issues and a few obnoxious missions. There are a awful lot more things I don't like about City of Heroes, mostly areas where some of the innovations I mentioned above haven't been back-incorporated into the design. I still think the sound quality in both games sucks badgers. I still think some enemy groups are way overused, and some storylines and villain groups are way underused. But now that I realize just how far the entire rest of the industry lags behind City of Heroes and especially behind City of Villains in overall level of innovation and customer service, I realize just how well and thoroughly spoiled I am. Thank you!

[geldonyetich2]

I'd be surprised if more than 1 out of 100 people on the Internet who bother to read all that in its entirety.  Basically, he's just saying that he's a relative MMORPG newb that took for granted a lot of City of Heroes innovations and, as of playing Tabula Rasa, he has seen the error of his ways.  Summaries FTW.

My jaded prespective?  Well, part of me says, "Big whoop - the dude's got his own perspective, and it's unusually uninformed."  Another part of me says, "Actually, this message does some pretty effective crucifixion of how blowfully MMORPGs have innovated, and how many people have adapted to suck, through the eyes of a unbiased n00b."  Overall, not buggered either way because it's not like many people are going to read or do something about it anyway.

Don't let the "Guide Contributor" title throw you, this guy's not affiliated with NcSoft or anything, he just posted a (really long) guide on the message board about how to exploit Issue 10 to get badges.

[eldaec]

No Attribute Points:
Ubiquitous Instanced Missions:
Flight:
Sidekicking and Exemplaring:
Cellphones:

Agree with all of those.

Extraordinary Forum:

Hadn't really thought about it, but now he mentions it, yes, the official forum is pretty straightforward to use if you actually need to find shit out - which is unusual.

Points he missed:

Active and Soloable Support Classes
Discussed this ad infinitum everywhere, active decisions in combat, short duration buffs with large flashy effects, healing only as a last resort etc etc.


Stacking
Every other MMOG I ever played runs insists you don't have too many ppl of any one class by applying stupid limits on what you can stack (no more than one dot! no more than one def debuff! etc etc). Almost the only thing you can't stack in CoH is the same power from the same player. This makes groups of 8 of the same class viable.

Character design
Obviously. I'm much more interested in showing off my leet design skills than the off-grey pants of doom I just looted. Also, recognising that shape, choice of bright colours, and large, easily identifiable logos are MUCH more important than having 40 different nostril sliders. Faces are too small to see, and point away from the screen 98% of the time. I live in hope that another developer will recognise this BEFORE I DIE.

Community building by adding content at all levels
CoH content really does get slapped in at all levels. Not just tacked on the end a la 'every other mmog'. This means people actually replay early levels instead of seeking ways to powerlevel through them, in turn this helps new/casual players to get groups.

[tazelbain]

But what have you done for me lately?  CoH is dying on the vine. Superbases were crap.  PvP was crap.  Archtypes never panned out.  Still no end game just a grind.  Crafting was alright, but it didn't affect the stale mission running that is draging the game down.

I still say eveyone should buy this game and play for a month or two, but CoX has never been able to justify why someone should play longer.  That is a failure in a subscribtion-based game.

Maybe it would be fun to have a "How would you fix CoX?" thead.

[bhodi]

Maybe it would be fun to have a "How would you fix CoX?" thead.

Not really, it's too easy.

1. Double the XP, quadruple it after 35.
2. add 10x the amount of Prestige, accumulate in all modes not just SG mode, decouple it from influence/infamy.
3. Allow people to exemplar and sidekick 2 or 3 people per person.

[Hutch]

Maybe it would be fun to have a "How would you fix CoX?" thead.

Not really, it's too easy.

1. Double the XP, quadruple it after 35.
2. add 10x the amount of Prestige, accumulate in all modes not just SG mode, decouple it from influence/infamy.
3. Allow people to exemplar and sidekick 2 or 3 people per person.

1. I'd say double it from 20-35, then something bigger (2.5 - 3.0 maybe) after that. At 4x you'd be leveling mighty fast, I think. But whatever the rate, yes please increase the xp gain.
3. Agree. It would be nice to just pick one player and then pull the rest of the group up & down to them.

[eldaec]

XP appears to increase again at 45+, just because the teams are more efficient and missions are set up in a way that gives out xp like candy.

Also, once you are at 40 the game really has shown you all it has, you have access to all the powers, and archvillians abound.

With that in mind, I'd want to knock a little off of time from 20-30, and halve time from 30-40. 40+ is ok imo.

[geldonyetich2]

Maybe it would be fun to have a "How would you fix CoX?" thead.

My own take goes something like this:

1) Add a self-perpetuating end-game that involves world-shaking dynamic player involvement.  (A suggestion that a lot of CoH players seem to hate.)

2) Tweak various villain groups to have higher experience values if they're a greater challenge to confront.
(Currently Freakshow equals Malta in terms of experience gain, but Freakshow are a lot less dangerous opponents.  Consequently, many players deliberately avoid the tougher foes and this hurts enemy diversification.  Alternately, we can just stop spawning Freakshow after 30 or so, but I prefer variety.)

3) Here is a link to the current experience chart.  The trouble is somewhere between 15 and 39, when the "number of minions to kill to gain a level" jump from 466 to 4050. (It remains at 4050 from 40-50.)  My thought is that the grind should scale at a less steep rate, reaching about 1500 by level 32.  By 32 to 50 it start scaling up again until it roughly make up for the lost minions by the time it reaches 50.   

The overall motivation behind the changes in #3 is this: the grind is not so much a bother once you have a whole lot of powers under your belt.   It's the 15-32 range, where you're slogging hard just to get enough powers to for a reasonably perpetuating fun play experience, that you encounter difficulty.  Also, by 32 you should have a good idea if this is the kind of hero/villain you really want to slog your way to 50 with.   A reduced experience grind targeted specifically at the lower levels fits the bill well there.

[tazelbain]

Fiddling with the numbers would probably get me comeback for a month. But if they want it to be my primary game, they are going to have to resolve some thing about the repetitive missions and the end game.

So here is my end game for CoX:

City of Peril

There is another city located far away from RI and PC. Without Heroes or Villians to defend it,  CoP has fallen into complete colapse from the Rikki invasion. So the desperate citezens have requested the help of anybody to rebuild it. So starting at lvl 40 players will be able to adopt a neighborhood in the CoP. For Villians, you lord over it like a Mafia Boss. For Heroes, you become the Champian and Adviser. Basically you play SimCity from a SuperDudes perspective. The better you take care of your neighborhood, the nicer perks you can receive so you can pimp out you and your neighbor hood. Who doesn't want a 100ft statue in their honor?

[eldaec]

2) Tweak various villain groups to have higher experience values if they're a greater challenge to confront.
(Currently Freakshow equals Malta in terms of experience gain, but Freakshow are a lot less dangerous opponents.  Consequently, many players deliberately avoid the tougher foes and this hurts enemy diversification.  Alternately, we can just stop spawning Freakshow after 30 or so, but I prefer variety.)

They already do this.

And Malta > Freakshow in xp terms.

Longbow, Rikti, Devouring Earth, are the other three with xp bonuses that immeadiately spring to mind.

[Margalis]

I have to chuckle at this:

A friend just pointed me to a blog in which a bunch of current and former MMO programmers are arguing about MMO design theory. And one of their most prominent articles, one they put a permanent sidebar link to, refers to the insoluble problem in all MMOs of what to do if you and a friend want to play together, but your friend has more time per week to play than you do? Pretty soon he's higher level than you; you can't survive his missions, and if he joins you for your missions, neither of you gets any XP. And I read that article, literally just the other day, with a kind of sick fascination. How could all these veterans of the industry not know that this problem got solved three and a half years ago?

Owned.

[Trippy]

Except for some inexplicable reason if you exemplar down you don't get EXP. That never made sense to me especially back when Influence was meaningless at the levels you would typically exemplar down from.

[Fordel]

Something about CoH's leveling just turns me totally off. I'm not even sure what it is exactly, outside of 'grind'.

I had three 50's in DaoC, I have two 70's in WoW, I even played EVE for nearly a year.

I have never gotten past level 16 in CoH/V.



Not being able to advance at anything above a snails pace really sucked all the fun out of everything else that I liked about the game.

[geldonyetich2]

Something about CoH's leveling just turns me totally off. I'm not even sure what it is exactly, outside of 'grind'.
I had three 50's in DaoC, I have two 70's in WoW, I even played EVE for nearly a year.
I have never gotten past level 16 in CoH/V.

Dollars to donuts, it's the rate in which powers are being introduced.  In DAoC and WoW you get new abilities at a fairly constant rate from start to finish.  Not all of them are new, many of them are upgrades of existing powers (while all of CoH's are different).  However, the constant rate in which they're introduced keeps you fished in.  CoH's grind ramps up so viciously at the 12-40 point that many players can't stomach it.  I'm driven to alt a lot by it.

It's really unfortunate that division of NCSoft (formerly Cryptic) has made this decision.

[MaceVanHoffen]

All the things he lists are why CoX is my personal favorite MMO.  I actually play my max level characters, instead of avoiding them due to dragon l33t raid crap.

I've never found CoX to be grindy as to length of time to level, though I'm probably in the minority around here.  It can get repetitive, however.  If there's one thing they really need to work on it's the world content, especially on the villain side.  Running around the Rogue Isles, I often can't tell which zone I'm in until I look at my minimap.  More kinds of outdoor zones, besides cityscape and vaguely suburban parks, would be great.  There's really only a handful of true wilderness areas in the game.  I'd love more exotic zones too, like the shadow shard (which villains don't get access to outside of a few missions).

They've done a good job with the variety of missions recently, but more is always better.  I like what they did with the shorter arcs and taskforces in places like Striga Isle and, well, pretty much anyplace in CoV.  More of that, please!  Heck, even some new color palettes on those damn Oranbegan caves would be welcome.  But what they really need are completely new kinds of mission maps, added on a regular basis.

PvP is just not my thing (in MMOs, I love me a good FPS), but I actually think the devs did about as good a job as can be expected in a PvE-centric MMO.  The game suffers from the common problem of tacking on PvP to a PvE game, but at least they have some interesting zones to fight in, with ancillary objectives and what not.  Recluse's Victory is pretty darn fun.  The real problem is there's just not enough world pvp zones, and so it suffers from the first problem I mentioned:  not enough variety in world content.  Yeah, I know: Arena.  That's fun, but it's very instance-y and sterile.  Wild, reckless, chaotic pvp where anyone can join at any time and you can control giant spider robots and gun turrets is just so much more fun than the Arena that, well, it ruins the Arena for me.

[cosapi]

No Attribute Points: But I never felt they added anything to the other games; they were one more way to accidentally gimp your character by not making the right choices.

I know I can't be alone in this but, I personally love being able to customize my characters stats and skills as I see fit. And I wish more games would allow for the standard -minimum- of character growth to be at least on the same stage as diablo 2.

Here's why though. I hate seeing words like "gimp" or "twink", I don't think I've even used those words in years. But for arguments sake, I quite enjoy purposely "gimping" my character through randomization and I like to see if the game can provide me with alternative methods to accomplish my goals through interesting, entertaining, uncommon or strategic methods.

And I personally think that is a much more important example of game design, as opposed to locking ones character down a pre-determined set path.

Because when I get to pick and choose how I want to determine my character, I feel like I'm designing part of the game/experience. I can encounter my own challenges and epic stories by doing what I wasn't supposed to be able to do.

The "gimp" provides a far more entertaining play through if said game is designed well enough, as opposed to playing the pre-determined "hero".

[Merusk]

COH doesn't have attribute points because it doesn't need them.  Enhancements and ehn. slots were the "Att points" for that game.  Same concept (customizing your abilities), different execution.

[MaceVanHoffen]

COH doesn't have attribute points because it doesn't need them.  Enhancements and ehn. slots were the "Att points" for that game.  Same concept (customizing your abilities), different execution.

It's not so much attribute points as what attribute points represent:  something that must be increased through looting and raiding, often in increasingly poorly designed encounters.

In CoX, you can tweak your character through normal gameplay.  There's no need to gather up 50+ people who don't even like each other and get them to cooperate in some dungeon that's been risk/reward optimized by accountants, all for the chance that an item will drop that a handful of said 50+ people will be able to use.  No thanks.

Sure, the CoX style of gameplay could be had with attribute points.  But no one seems to do it.  As soon as you add strength, dexterity, penis size, or whatever, game developers go into some sort of Rain Man mode where they simply MUST itemize a game, and that starts us down the dark path, that forever dominates our destiny ...

Given the OP's background, he probably wasn't thinking about attribute points in that way.  But I sure as hell do.

[Rendakor]

Running TFs at low levels to get SOs early isn't looting? Sure, it only takes 8 people, but otherwise, how does this differ? CoX gets it right, where everyone in the group gets a useful item at the end instead of just 10% of the members, but that doesn't change what it is, just superior execution. Plus, CoH has had the Hamidon raid thing in from (near?) launch for what were, at the time, the best enhances in game. There's also the Rikti War Zone space ship that is very raidlike, though I've never completed it so I don't know if theres a comparable reward.

[MaceVanHoffen]

Running TFs at low levels to get SOs early isn't looting?

The difference in degree is huge.  You mention a key point:  the game is designed such that everyone gets a reward when participating in team activities.

Another key difference is the size and composition of groups required to do anything.  Task forces and strike forces take between 3-8 people, and you can pretty much run with any combination of archetypes.  The gameplay experience of having to collect many, many more people than that is so completely different as to be incomparable.  Now, ship and Hamidon raids are as close as CoX gets to the large raids of other games, as they take anywhere from 2-3 groups up to as much as 5 groups of people.  Once again, though, there is a key difference:  nothing from a ship or Hamidon raid is required to advance your character at max level.  It's just gravy, an optional fun time.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that getting people together for the only largescale raid people do regularly (rikti ship raids) is very, very easy.  People actually want to do it.  And, people can join midway if they want, or leave early.  You continually get merits throughout the raid, so you get benefits for as long as you continue to pitch in.  The rikti ship cycles its shields (ending the raid) within an hour or so, depending on how many bombs are set, so there's never any way a well-organized, hardcore group can monopolize it.  While typical of the design of CoX, that gameplay is diametrically opposite to what most people would call a raid, even though that's the term we're left with.

[Rendakor]

You said attributes represent something advanced through looting and raiding, and that these weren't present in CoH. They are. Also, way to describe not having an endgame as a feature.

[MaceVanHoffen]

You said attributes represent something advanced through looting and raiding, and that these weren't present in CoH. They are.

That's not precisely what I meant.  Of course you advance your character through acquiring loot.  The actual game mechanic might be similar, but the gameplay experience is completely different.  Raiding in WoW feels like raiding in DAoC feels like raiding in EQ ... but none of those feels like raiding in CoX.

Also, way to describe not having an endgame as a feature.

There is an endgame, it's just not one that's typical of the genre.  And for me, that's an overwhelming positive.

[Rendakor]

That's not precisely what I meant.  Of course you advance your character through acquiring loot.  The actual game mechanic might be similar, but the gameplay experience is completely different.  Raiding in WoW feels like raiding in DAoC feels like raiding in EQ ... but none of those feels like raiding in CoX.

So you're arguing that CoH raiding is more fun and "feels" better? I don't really agree, but that's because I've had as much difficulty getting together 7 other people for groups in CoH as I've had getting 4-5 in WoW or EQ2, and don't feel the combat itself to be vastly different from standard "mash hotkeys" stuff. They've made it more "accessible" by lowering the number of people, but a TF requires just as much commitment as anything I've seen elsewhere, timewise.

There is an endgame, it's just not one that's typical of the genre.  And for me, that's an overwhelming positive.

Alting?

[Llava]

Archtypes never panned out.

What?

[tazelbain]

Epic Archtypes

[eldaec]

What?

Epic Archtypes

Yeah, you know, epic archtypes...

[MaceVanHoffen]

Meh, we can disagree.  There's lots of games.  I've never taken as long on a TF as I have on even the simplest raid in other games.  People can log off while the rest continue on a TF, and you can spread a TF over multiple nights.  I wouldn't put that as equal to the commitment of other games, but YMMV.

[Llava]

Epic Archtypes

Oh.  That makes more sense.  Sort of.  Kheldians do have a shit-ton of content just for them, but you are correct that the Coralax, Blood of the Black Stream, and Avilans are still missing and probably will remain so.

[Rendakor]

Meh, we can disagree.  There's lots of games.  I've never taken as long on a TF as I have on even the simplest raid in other games.  People can log off while the rest continue on a TF, and you can spread a TF over multiple nights.  I wouldn't put that as equal to the commitment of other games, but YMMV.

Raids in WoW are only reset every so many days, so you can take them at your own pace. Also, EQ2 has several raid instances that are a single boss, or 1-2 trash pulls and a boss (at least, it did at lower tiers; havent raided eq2 since t6 or so). These would take half an hour to an hour with competent people, tops.

[Trippy]

No Attribute Points: In hindsight, I don't know how I failed to notice they were missing. But I never felt they added anything to the other games; they were one more way to accidentally gimp your character by not making the right choices. Attribute points are a hold-over from the earliest primitive editions of D&D, where every character had more or less the same armor and weapons and where your attribute points were the only customization there were. Where you got the guts to drop them completely from this design, and how you stuck to your guns when NCsoft management almost has to have leaned on you to put them in? I have no idea. But thank you for the courage. You removed some highly unnecessary complexity.

By "attribute points" I'm assuming he means things like Str, Dex, and Int that you assign at character creation. The last MMORPG I cared about those things in during character creation was UO. In theory in EQ what you choose along with your race selection mattered but in practice it really didn't.

Ubiquitous Instanced Missions:

Yup. Though the bland mission design is one of its biggest if not the biggest flaw in the game.

Flight:

I'd change this to ubiquitous travel powers. I could actually "fly" in EQ (hover is probably a better description) with my Bard not to mention run at Super Speed-like velocities so CoH certainly wasn't the first but allowing everybody to pick a cool travel power at a relatively low level certainly was.

Sidekicking and Exemplaring: A friend just pointed me to a blog in which a bunch of current and former MMO programmers are arguing about MMO design theory. And one of their most prominent articles, one they put a permanent sidebar link to, refers to the insoluble problem in all MMOs of what to do if you and a friend want to play together, but your friend has more time per week to play than you do? Pretty soon he's higher level than you; you can't survive his missions, and if he joins you for your missions, neither of you gets any XP. And I read that article, literally just the other day, with a kind of sick fascination. How could all these veterans of the industry not know that this problem got solved three and a half years ago?

It was only "solved" in CoH because it was built from the ground up to support up and down scaling of powers and because it had no item loot. For item-centric MMORPGs (which is all but a handful of them) it's a much trickier problem.

Cellphones:

Yawn.

Extraordinary Forum

I agree NCsoft and the various members that compile the "guide to guides" do a great job with the forums.


Most of the stuff he listed above are pretty minor -- i.e. he left out the really innovative stuff.

No equipment - mentioned above.

Scaling powers - Powers that scale up with you as you level (or downlevel) rather than getting them at discrete tiers. Also mentioned above.

Adjustable difficulty levels - They need something above Invincible, though, like Ludcrious.

Appearance customization - Nuff said.

Individual loot - No fighting over loot. Ever.

Inspirations - Skittles!

Soloability - Except for a handful of powersets (e.g. Empathy Defenders) the game is designed to let players solo short of AVs and possibly some Elite Bosses. Also see Inspirations above.

Single Hero vs. multiple enemies - though the game has been nerfed down to City of Minion Arresters it's still a lot better than your standard 5 or 6 heroes beating on a single target gameplay.

No autoattack - Well technically you could setup one of your attack powers on auto but who ever does that?

I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting at the moment.

[Glazius]

Running TFs at low levels to get SOs early isn't looting?

Blueside, there's a story arc you can do at level 15 or so, and at the end of it a shop opens up where you can buy Talismans, which are SOs with a funny name. 13, 17, and 21. Of course, the selection is extremely limited (magic accuracy, mutant damage, natural damage, science recharge, tech endurance) but it's worth noting.

I believe it was put in solely so supergroup enhancement bins could feel useful.

Also, way to describe not having an endgame as a feature.

Endgame's just another word for restricting advancement options.

[Trippy]

Hey Glazius is back. Did you ever get your connection problems fixed?

[Glazius]

Hey Glazius is back. Did you ever get your connection problems fixed?

I caved into broadband. It actually works out cheaper than a second phone line.

Still playing CoH. Not keeping up here so much anymore, for doctorate-related reasons.

[Rendakor]

Also, way to describe not having an endgame as a feature.

Endgame's just another word for restricting advancement options.

Did you just imply that games should have no level cap?

[Glazius]

Also, way to describe not having an endgame as a feature.

Endgame's just another word for restricting advancement options.

Did you just imply that games should have no level cap?

Every game has a power curve. The top exists somewhere, if only in theory.

In my experience what "endgame" means is that progression up the power curve abruptly slows down, and the range of activities you can perform to advance yourself along the power curve is likewise drastically curtailed. I won't go so far as to say "endgame" is better called "completely different game", because after all it shares most of the controls, but it's close.