Ask City of Heroes Lead Designer Jack Emmert

Massively Multiplayer games have grown increasingly popular in the last few years, and one of the hottest products out there today is NCSoft and Cryptic Studios' City of Heroes. City of Heroes is currently hovering around the 180,000 player population mark, with a European launch for the game coming up fast. The lead designer of the online super hero game is Jack Emmert, veteran of the video game and roleplaying game industries. He has written gaming supplements for Deadlands and All Flesh Must Be Eaten, reads several dozen comics a month, and saves the world on a regular basis. Jack has kindly agreed to answer questions from Slashdot readers about game design, massive games, and what it's like to be a superhero, so go ahead and let em' fly. One question per post, please, but as many questions as you'd like. We'll forward the best on to Jack to answer and post his responses when we've got them.

Comments

COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[Skyshadow]

So far as I can tell, City of Heros is unique among major online games in that it uses its in-game mechanics to discourage people from spending every last waking hour in the warm glow of their monitor plugging away at their character instead of rewarding obsessively constant attention to the game.

I'd like to hear about this decision since it's so obviously 180 degrees away from what other designers have been up to. What was the reason for this decision? Was it a public health consideration, a method of letting more casual players keep up with the no-life crowd, a way of reducing load on your servers, or are there other more significant reasons that I'm not seeing? Do you think that this decision has impacted the playerbase of your game considerably in terms of who picks up the game and who is still playing a few months in? In hindsight, should you have structured this aspect differently?

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[rhsanborn]

Note http://www.eve-online.com/ also has a system that lets people who aren't online constantly keep up with those that are as well. Thei training system is based on time as opposed to in game experience.

MMO's get paid by the month, whether your online or not. But if your not online, you don't cost them as much money.

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[Anonymous Coward]

How did you come to the conclusion that it discourages constant playing? It didn't seem an different from other MMORPG's in that regard.

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[Kentamanos]

I played CoH up until about two months ago, and I'm not sure what in game mechanics you're referring to. Is this a fairly recent design change?

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[451]

I played every waking hour for three months straight. Then I got a job, and had to leave Paragon city for good, since I was not about to stay awake for 24 hrs a day 7 days a week. Where is this control you refer to?

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[leyf]

What is the 'go outside and play now' feature? Only limiter I know of is daily server maintenance.

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[badmammajamma]

Yeah, I've been playing this game almost since launch and I'm not familiar with this "in-game mechanics" you refer to.

I will say that the game is friendlier to the causal gamer than most but that's a different issue altogether.

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[Anonymous Coward]

My understanding is that CoH reduces the awards for tasks completed after X number of hours of gameplay on a given day.

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure the OP was thinking about WoW, which isn't surprising since they came out at roughly the same time.

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[Damodred]

Are you perhaps thinking of World of Warcraft and its "Rest" system? The one where the longer you NOT play, the more XP you can gain upon returning?

If so, it doesn't work very well. The XP boost lasts for about 10 minutes, or 3-5 monsters, and then it's back to normal. That's not really much of an incentive to "rest". At least that was its state a week ago...

City of Heroes does not have any such feature. What it does have is a sidekick/exemplar feature, where you can invite a friend lower/higher than your level to fight with you by raising/lowering their level for the duration of the "Team Up".

This does promote some stress relief, as you don't have to level as quickly as your friends; you can just be their sidekick if they outpace you (or vice versa).

That is one unique feature that all MMOs should have, but I don't think it's the one you're referring to...

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[Skyshadow]

Yup, my bad. Hey, they came out around the same time, I just mixed up the features.

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[Kentamanos]

While WoW is not live yet, you are correct. It does have a mechanism that slows down power leveling. Basically, when your character is rested (either from being logged out or hanging out in town for a while), you get a lot more XP (can't remember if it was 150% or 200%...I only played a little while in the first beta, the open beta is coming soon though).

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[Minna Kirai]

Hey, they came out around the same time,

No they didn't. COH came out last year, WOW may come out sometime in the future. 2003 is not around the same as 2005

Furthermore, it wasn't a new feature when WOW added it, either. Ultima Online did that same kind of XP-rate-limiter years ago.

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[Duncan3]

There is really no need for this. Eventually you need to "grow up" and "get a job" at which time you will no longer play these types of games more then an hour or 2 a day.

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[Anonymous Coward]

You're thinking of the wrong game.

That's WoW, with that feature. CoH has no such feature set and it has its share of obsessive near 24 hour a day players.

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[BlueJay465]

I think it was the fear that characters were going a little funny being in the game for 24/7, as beautifully illustrated by a recent MacHall strip.

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[Cosmik]

To be pedantic, COH beta'd in 2003, and came out in April this year.

WoW beta'd this year and will be released at the end of this month.

The rest system came out...oooh...around a couple of months ago.

So yeah, odd to mix them up, completely different game setting aside.

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[Dirtside]

If so, it doesn't work very well. The XP boost lasts for about 10 minutes, or 3-5 monsters, and then it's back to normal. That's not really much of an incentive to "rest". At least that was its state a week ago...

You've misrepresented how the rest system works. You can accumulate up to 1.5 levels' worth of bonus exp, which you earn when you kill monsters (being "rested" means you get double exp for killing a monster; quest exp is unaffected). You accumulate rest exp at the rate of 5% of a level every 8 hours offline, as long as you log out in an inn or major city. Log out elsewhere, and it accumulates at 1/4 of the inn rate.

If your rest exp is only lasting for 3-5 kills, then you've only been resting offline for an hour or two. And as far as I can tell, it's working exactly as advertised; I've always had exactly as much rest exp as I should, given the amount of time I've been offline.

Whether the rest system is a good idea is a different argument entirely.

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[Elroy Jetson]

Nope, there is no awards/rewards reduction after X number of hours playing, unless you are refering to needing more xp per level at the higher levels (and facing tougher foes after lvl 40-ish). The only way CoH discourages "powerleveling" is by having plenty of low/mid game content and a relatively easy to reach lvl 50 security level cap (the cap was lvl 40 at release). Although I myself don't have one (I have shown a strong tendancy try a different archtype by level 30), I do know several people who have managed to get 2 or more lvl 50 "toons" without quitting their job/social life.

You may be thinking of World of Warcraft, as they were attempting to implement something like that.

Re:COH's "go outside and play now, kids" feature

[Anonymous Coward]

i grew up and had a job when i played everquest, as did everyone who i was playing with in the guilds i was in. there were some kids, but they were rare, and not so much welcomed in the guilds i was in.

i worked 50+ hours a week, and still had to time play at least 5 hours a day on weekdays and about 16 on weekends.

-Chris

City of Heroes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never heard of CoH. Anyone care to give a primer?

Re:City of Heroes?

[Anonymous Coward]

STFW

Why stop playing?

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

If you had the option of living the rest of your 'real' life as your character in your game, would you?

Endgame

[Selfbain]

I'd like to know how they designed the game without ever thinking about end game content. I played this game for all of a month before I realized that once I made it to 50, there was going to be nothing for me to do. After reading the game boards, I found I was not alone and that lots of other people had reached the level cap only to find they'd wasted their time.

Re:Endgame

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasted their time? I would hope that they were having fun just playing the game, and didn't keep playing the game with some strange idea that at level 50 the "real fun" begins.

Re:Endgame

[Selfbain]

I mean they found that once they'd reached level 50, they couldn't advance their character any more. The game has no equipment and there are no rare enhancements (unless that's been changed since I quit but I don't think it has). So basically, once you hit the cap, your character is now finished.

Re:Endgame

[AuMatar]

TO a lot of people, thats a good thing. The reason I quit EQ was because camping for loot is *not* my idea of fun. I want to be able to finish a character and then just go out and have fun with them. Advancing a character is the boring part of the game.

Re:Endgame

[badmammajamma]

I doubt this is the case. Granted, it is lacking in endgame content at the moment but almost all new MMOs do. EQ started with almost no endgame and now it has far more endgame than anything else. I can only assume they didn't expect people to level as quickly as they have?

However, I would like to know what their plan is for enhancing the endgame. I know they are adding another Archetype for people who reach 50 but that just means I get to start grinding over again from level 1. As a hardcore gamer, I would like to see a lot more endgame content sooner rather than later. Starting new characters simply gets old after a while and I would really like to stick with CoH since it has amazing potential and one of the smoothest starts for an MMO ever. I also like the fact there are no damn elves in it.

Great start guys...just keep it up. You can bet Sony and Blizzard will be pushing very hard to make their games stand out from the crowd.

Re:Endgame

[Flamefly]

I found I was not alone and that lots of other people had reached the level cap only to find they'd wasted their time

Every second you spend in a game, you are wasting your time, that is indeed the point of games, a usually fun way to waste time when you have nothing better (or more fun) to do. To think that the game will be forever forfilling, that when you reach the top level you'll suddenly get access to a trust fund or a blast of enlightenment might be a bit of a wishful dream :] Luckily you realised it before you actually had to experience it.

All MMOG's suffer from this same problem with levelling, the game makers need some way of keeping people engaged in the game (time == money in pocket) and the obvious answer is levelling, they are purely timesinks, you can base the levels on a logarithmic scale, so it's nigh-on impossible to reach the upper echelons, but there has to be an end somewhere, otherwise the devs would spend forever coding additional quests, spells, badges, whatever (which costs them moola, so bad!). The developers hope that by the time you've spend so long in game you would have created friends/aquaintences that would take over from the timesink aspect and you'll essentially become addicted (through habit) to playing the game.

When players themselves can create quests like the good old text based MUD's you'll see something that doesn't need this boring levelling basis to power it. People generally (I hope) play these mmog's to play with like minded people who they can have fun with, but I feel that developers don't tend to build off this aspect of MMOG's and focus on 'if we dangle this carrot of fire shielding VII at level 50, then they'll force themselves to play through the crap times.' I'll stop before I start comparing it to religion.. :}

FF.

Re:Endgame

[Selfbain]

Sony appears to want EQ2 to stand out by rushing it through beta into launch to beat WoW to the market. I'm having visions of the SWG launch all over again.

Re:Endgame

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I always felt, with Everquest that because I didn't constantly camp for loot, or beg higher level characters to kit me up with all kinds of equipment that my character was far far outclassed by all the "real players" in the game. In COH there just isn't the same need to aquire equipment. On the other hand, the latest expansion added badges which give characters of all levels something else to work toward. And it looks like for high level characters that can actually give them real bonuses as well.
In any case I've never gotten a character near the level cap in any of these games, so it has never really worried me.

Re:Endgame

[Phrogman]

But that is true of many other MMORPGs too that lack an "Endgame". From what I can tell Dark Age of Camelot seems to have introduced the concept of an "Endgame" that is different from the regular gameplay, and now people seem to expect it, but its not the norm.

What if anything is the "Endgame" for Everquest? Surely once you have all the stuff and you have all the levels thats pretty much it no?

Arguably the Endgame for City of Heroes will come about with the City of Villains expansion which will introduce PvP play into City of Heroes. It will be a standalone expansion from what I hear, but both games are going to have to have some changes made to allow PvP.

I am playing COH right now, with no PvP, no End game and I am perfectly happy with it. When my main character (currently level 37) reaches 50, they will retire until PvP is implemented. Not everyone anticipates an Endgame as much as some I guess, you see *I ENJOY THE GAME AS IT IS* not for some nebulous endgame concept that has still to be developed, or I wouldn't bother playing it.

Re:Endgame

[phusg]

lots of other people had reached the level cap only to find they'd wasted their time.

Hmmm, and getting dished up some 30 second outro animation makes it all a worthy investment of your time? ;)

Sadly, I know exactly what you mean...

Re:Endgame

[Selfbain]

Uhm, in Everquest it was nearly impossible to make your character the absolute best it could be due to the sheer effort required to reach most of the endgame. It was almost always possible to advance it further and the gear you could obtain could add effects to your character and change its appearance. Aside from minor color changes and a cape, there is no way to change your character's appearance in CoH. Also, there is no equipment so your character is as advanced as it's going to become once you reach the cap. When they increased the cap before, all they did was allow you to pick some new abilities that if you had really wanted, you could have gotten them before.

Re:Endgame

[Anonymous Coward]

There are the ultra hard to aquire Hamidon Enhancements available at lvl 50. Unfortunately that means you have to beat the Hamidon, something that hasn't been successfully done since shortly after Issue 2 was added.

There is an "endgame" in CoH, it is just that it is so mind boglingly difficult that many who reached level 50 are frustrated by it.

Re:Endgame

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean? You can change anything about your characters appearance you want except size and basic model (female, male, hulk)

Re:Endgame

[Selfbain]

When you create the character you can, and I think you can make two more costumes for the character later on but your options for their appearance are limited beyond that.

Re:Endgame

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, you can modify your costume whenever you feel like it (By going to the proper store).

Re:Endgame

[Anonymous Coward]

there are no rare enhancements

Arguably, there are rare enhancements. Hamidon (he's been there since before the first major update, which raised the area he was in from level 40 to 50) and the Hydra both drop enhancements that improve two attributes of a power instead of one. They generally aren't worth the effort though.

Re:Endgame

[Eris13]

And with the addition of temporary powers and accolades it is possible for your character to have "equipment" of a sort. Mmmm I love my Crey CB9X pistol.

Re:Endgame

[Talanvor]

Also there's the Eden trial where the crystal titan drops special enhancements. I've gotten a triple out of that, though for my power set it wasn't extremely useful. Ah well.

Re:Endgame

[jsc19702]

I made 50 in this game and I agree. Even 40+ this game became a joke. There is zero high end content. I said the same as you. I'll be back when City of Villians comes out. You know what? I have lost complete interest now. It's been too long. You will do the same just like most...

Re:Endgame

[darkwing_bmf]

Well, I think the idea is you are supposed to enjoy the journey, not the destination.

Re:Endgame

[Stalks]

I'm surprised you criticised CoH for its character creation. I have always thought CoH had an amazingly in-depth cpstume creator with millions of possibilities making every character unique.

Have you tried playing Lineage 2? aka, Attack of the Clones?

Re:Endgame

[nycbrujah]

There are a few more options than that.

At levels 20, 30, and 40 you get an extra costume slot. In essence you can your initial costume plus three different costumes. The only thing you cant change is your sex and character build, other than that as long as you have the influence your set.
At level 20 you can add a cape to any of the costume slots and at level 30 you can add auras to all of the costume slots.

I really don't see how that's at all limiting. I've been playing since the beta and unless it's a super group policy to have the same costume, I haven't seen two costumes the same.

Doesn't it piss you off...

[Anonymous Coward]

when people call it "City of Heros"?

City Of VIllians

[mothis2]

How many more people do you think City of Villians to the game?

When will City of Villans be rolled up with CoH?

[S810]

I was curious when City of Villians will be rolled up with City of Heros?

It would be very kewl to be able to choose, at time of character creation, either a Hero or a Villan.

Please let us know if, and when, this should happen.

Statesman's helmet

[CrashPoint]

So, Statesman...has Magneto asked for his helmet back yet?

Inspiration

[cuteseal]

Where do you draw your inspiration from? Do you find that people compare your game to all time greats like Everquest etc?

How do you plan to get me back?

[bugnuts]

Jack, I played COH for a while, and am still very impressed by it. You should be proud of your remarkable achievement of finding the right niche. But after playing a couple months and doing several story arcs, I fell into the level-grind abyss. Things stopped being fun. The distance to my next power was seen in terms of xp, not in terms of heroic adventure.

So, what is going to happen to get me back? How can you significantly reduce the "level grind" (even if it's just the feeling of grinding levels) to get casual players like myself back?

Re:How do you plan to get me back?

[Ghostx13]

Bah! Damn my lack of mod points; other wise I'd mod you up as this is nearly the exact question I would have asked.

I played CoH since the beta, and after about 4 months after the release I just totally quit, because the game had gone from one of the most fun games I'd ever played to nothing but level grind to the next cool power. That being said, I did play something like 40+ hours a week (sysadmin, so I played at work alot ;-) ) so I probably burnt out alot quicker than your average joe.

Re:How do you plan to get me back?

[stonecypher]

Hint: if you know the phrase "level grind" you're not a casual gamer.

Re:How do you plan to get me back?

[sheetsda]

I don't think the problem is level-grind per se. I fall into the same catagory you describe yourself in (played two characters to level 40+), and I found the thing that finally drove me from the game was the unrelenting monotony. Every single mission in the game can be summed up as: "Go here, kill some stuff, click on some glowing objects" or subset of the three. The only way to fail the missions was to let time run out, and some didn't have time limits, and those that did the limits were four times or more as long as it took me to do the mission. With my second 40+ character, I played only two missions, both before level 6. The rest was done grinding thru task forces until level 32, and then soloing with fire imps. CoH has nothing in the way of a item economy, something that I found I sorely missed from my days in Diablo2, and one of the things that still continued the make the game interesting after I had mastered playing it and building characters. Players only very rarely buy enhancements from other players, there's no reason to: even the very high level ones (excluding hamidon, etc.. enhancements, which are totally optional and lack of them doesn't handicap your character) are sold by NPCs who never run out.

Re:How do you plan to get me back?

[tm2b]

The only way to fail the mission was to let time run out,

Not so. There are some missions that you can fail by preventing the bad guys from destroying something glowing. It's not a large number of missions, but they're there.

Re:How do you plan to get me back?

[sheetsda]

That must have been implemented after I quit.

Re:How do you plan to get me back?

[Minna Kirai]

There are some missions that you can fail by preventing the bad guys from destroying something glowing.

Really? There are "reverse psychology" missions, where the only way to win is NOT to attack the villian?

If you destroy the glowing thing, instead of letting the bad guy do it, do you still win?

Re:How do you plan to get me back?

[thenerdgod]

Others have asked how to reduce the "Level Grind", but I'd like to get more specific. This Halloween, the wife and I passed up several of the usual assigned door missions, stopped caring about XP, and did nothing but run door to door playing trick-or-treat. I think what appealed to us was that it was not merely a change, but partially a game-within-a-game. It was gambling, with the bonus that we got badges for killing so many pumpkin-headed monsters, and witches, and zombies.

Also, recently, Paragon City was "Attacked" by roving bands of monsters, which was fun, as well as the addition of new zones. Obviously things are being done to help alleviate the feeling of sameness and repetition, but it is unavoidably still there, since there are really only five or six common missions.

My question is, specifically, what other forms of game-play are being contemplated for non-PvP expansion? Will we see more interactivity in the city? Will, perhaps, the very landscape of the existing zones change (It was interesting when I heard that all the lights went out in one Zone when the city was attacked). Will there be opportunities, as there were this halloween, for large groups of people to come together to fight giant, lumbering monsters, and not just beat up the same group of baddies in some abandoned warehouse?

(The Apparatchik, Coalition of Communist Crusaders for the Proletariat)

Re:How do you plan to get me back?

[thenerdgod]

I'd like to expand on what I wrote above. When we started playing, I mentioned to a friend that what I really wanted from an MMORPG like City of Heroes, was the ability to inhabit a place like Kurt Busiek's "Astro City", where normal (and not so normal people) lived out their lives amidst an ever-changing landscape with well-known and active villains and heros. What I was envisioning was a place where not every super-villain showed up inside a door mission, where sometimes an entire part of town face faced with a common peril, and all the heroes had to answer the call of duty, come together, and fight against some great foe, where even dying in the line of fire was worth it just to say "I fought the Kraken when he attacked Pier Cove and ate that oil tanker!" I think what bugged me was the oppresiveness of the mundane in MMORPGs... Not the Level Mill, necessarily, but the fact that you even worry about levels to acheive some goal. I'd prefer that the goal be taking part in some larger shared story, and not getting the next chit on your 'blast the baddies' power*.

So, to that end, I'd ask "What are the game designers doing to bring the players together, to give them a true sense of community and a real stake in the game, instead of giving them a stake in the lesser reward of levelling up for the next power slot or costume change?

(The Apparatchik, Coalition of Communist Crusaders for the Proletariat)

*Part of working on the supergroup I'm in was working towards that, that even if the game offered no great ever-present Hero or Villain, we could fall back on the standard of Freedom versus Oppression, twisted, of course, into the tongue-in-cheek black-sheep-style heroics of being the Hero for the Wrong Side.

Re:How do you plan to get me back?

[Erik Hollensbe]

Yep. I got CoH a week within release (my first MMORPG purchase), and then bought FFXI. After spending some time with the quests in FFXI (which normally follow "you need to do this, killing stuff is something you'll need to do to get to it but however it's done is none of the game's business"), I just got disenfranchised with CoH and unfortunately cancelled my account about 2 weeks ago, which had some characters that I'd like to keep. I'm hoping that CoV won't let me down.

TF's were the in-game answer to this, but only marginally better (you fight better bad guys :) and very limited. No one wants to play Synapse 5 times because it's more interesting.

Re:How do you plan to get me back?

[tm2b]

Really? There are "reverse psychology" missions, where the only way to win is NOT to attack the villian?

D'oh! I meant, the only way to succeed is to prevent the bad guys from destroying the MacGuffins.

Re:How do you plan to get me back?

[Snaller]

Obviously things are being done to help alleviate the feeling of sameness and repetition, but it is unavoidably still there, since there are really only five or six common missions.


He wasn't just talking about the nature of missions, but that many run completely OUT of mission. Your contacts tell you come back in a couple of levels, and when you finally they do, the often say "well actually, come back in another level!" instead of giving you a mission!

And there is no good excuse for this, just recycle the old ones for christ sake.

Re:How do you plan to get me back?

[Snaller]

I can answer that for you: Nothing ;)

Long term plans?

[claytongulick]

I've been playing CoH (way too much!) since beta, and have really enjoyed it, but I am running into some of the same issues that alot of others are running into, lack of content, lack of purpose, no new powers, nothing but "grind". My question is this: With all of the new MMORPGs coming out (EQ2, WoW etc) this month, what will CoH do to keep my interest (and paying account)? New powers? Anything?

Re:Long term plans?

[Kazrath]

The only fundamental failure with CoH is the lack of risk/reward. The only "Drops" in the game are enhancements and inspirations. If they added in non combat stuff like "Costume pieces", Dyes, ect so people could get "non-combat" fun stuff I think it would add "some" flavor.

Tribute to a real-life hero

[Sheetrock]

Like many other Slashdotters, I was moved by the touching salute by many City of Hero players to Christopher Reeve.

Have there been any thoughts to incorporate his character or his message in your MMORPG in a more permanent way, perhaps allowing players to discover in-game through a quest or discussion with an NPC the merits of what he was proposing in real-life (making health research a priority, investigating the potential of stem cells, etc.)?

Re:Tribute to a real-life hero

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that that would be a politically charged message, as some parties seem to be against stem cell research (from aborted fetuses, anyway)..
I doubt they would include something like that.

Why No Mac Support?

[JohnA]

I would love to pay you a monthly fee, but alas, my Powerbook and it's Radeon 9700 are unsupported.

So why no Mac support? Any request to your tech support department is a canned response.

Re:Why No Mac Support?

[Kenja]

"So why no Mac support? Any request to your tech support department is a canned response."

I bet the reason is the same as it is with just about every other game. The cost of a Macintosh port and support would be more then the money made from the Macintosh market.

Re:Why No Mac Support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because mac users do not represent a big enough market share yet.

If Macs had over 25% of the gaming market, that would be a different story.

Re:Why No Mac Support?

[PMAvers]

I bet the reason is the same as it is with just about every other game. The cost of a Macintosh port and support would be more then the money made from the Macintosh market.

Someone should tell the companies doing ports that. There sure seems to be a lot of them... Heck, even TransGaming did a few, working with MacPlay to do the Tron port. If they're not making money on them, why do they keep on doing it?

Because they are. Making money, I mean. I never knew that companies didn't *like* to make money, and take losses just for kicks...

We know that NCSoft's got a few Mac programmers, due to them having done a Mac port of Lineage 1. Let's see 'em get on a Mac port of COH, and see what happens.

At this moment, the only people who want to take my money is Blizzard, with World of Warcraft, and Sony with EQ1. (Plus a few of the smaller ones, like Second Life & A Tale in the Desert.) *holds up a wad of cash* It's there... don't you want it?

Re:Why No Mac Support?

[Kenja]

Tron 2.0 uses OpenGL. City of Heroes uses DirectX 9. You figure it out.

Re:Why No Mac Support?

[Anonymous Coward]

CoH uses OpenGL, too. DirectX9 is only used for the sound, and the game porting companies have ways around all of that.

Porting to the Mac shouldn't be that big of a deal. I'd certainly love it, as then I could finally turn off this PC (which I kept around only for CoH). Everything else I do on my Macs.

Re:Why No Mac Support?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet the reason is the same as it is with just about every other game. Why use cross-platform libraries and tools instead of "proprietary" ones.

Yes I'm feeling cynic ... :/

Re:Why No Mac Support?

[droleary]

Tron 2.0 uses OpenGL. City of Heroes uses DirectX 9. You figure it out.

I think he did figure it out, which is why he's asking the Lead Designer why they developed a non-portable game when the state of OpenGL clearly allows you to maximize your profits by porting to Mac OS X or Linux or any supported platform. So it's disguised as a question of Mac support, but it really could be phrased as "What do you find OpenGL (and other portable libraries) lacking such that you have restricted your awesome game to a Windows-only audience?"

Re:Why No Mac Support?

[Kenja]

How much 3D software have your written? I've done a bit, and as much as I like OpenGL DirectX saves time and money. Its very hard to justify cross platform APIs these days. Now if some group where to take OpenGL and expand on it to make a true game API and maintain cross platform support (in an ideal world this would also include a HAL and virtual machine system so that the game would "just work" on all platforms).

Re:Why No Mac Support?

[jsc19702]

Let's see, Mac has less than 5% market share. Costs to port single player games are considerably less than MMORPG's I would guess. Mac's aren't worth the time financially to port most MMORPG's, that's why most aren't. Not hard to figure out.

Re:Why No Mac Support?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? DirectX isn't a game API either. OpenGL and DirectX are very much on par. If you want a game engine, there's plenty out there, and all the decent ones support both OpenGL and DirectX.

Only on slashdot will you find random people with no qualifications telling the world that some of the best people in the industry are using the wrong tool. Carmack is such a dumbass, he would have saved so much time and money using DirectX, right?

Re:Why No Mac Support?

[Kenja]

Last I checked openGL didn't include audio, network, disk IO, 2D and all the other stuff in DirectX. Or are you thinkign of Direct3D, one part of DirectX?

Re:Why No Mac Support?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be more then a port. Every month or so the client has to be patched. They would now be dealing with two clients.

Re:Why No Mac Support?

[qcubed]

actually, it was my understanding that the graphics of COH are opengl. it's everything else that isn't.

Re:Why No Mac Support?

[badmammajamma]

lol...the only companies that bother with Mac ports are the ones that expect very high volume. CoH is not a high volume product. They sell a few hundred thousand copies but they really make their money on subscription fees. The 1000 or so mac dorks that would subscribe just don't justify the cost. Supporting an MMO on two platforms is a whole different ballgame than supporting the typical single person or multiplayer game.

Oh, and most of the companies that do have Mac ports use porting companies to do one-time ports of the game. In an MMO where you have constant updates, how are you supposed to manage that?

Seriously, if you're a gamer you'll just buy a PC. I have a friend that's a Mac guy and that's what he had to do. Most of the Mac ports that are out there don't even allow multiplay between different platforms so the ports suck total ass. So, if he wants to play with his PC buddies, he's stuck anyway.

Sorry but the Mac is simply not a gaming platform. Nobody wants to do these ports, video cards for the Mac are much more expensive than for the PC, and you can't even put in your own damn sound card.

Re:Why No Mac Support?

[Nermal6693]

How is this different from most games? With the vast majority of games out there, both the Windows and Mac versions get updated whenever a patch is released. The only difference I can see is that with an online game, both updates will need to be released at the same time.

Capes

[jreaperhero]

Is it possible to iron your cape? Because I like to look fresh and clean in the game? Thx

Re:Capes

[Erik Hollensbe]

Perhaps Extreme SuperHero Ironing?

Why do I have to buy the game...

[teamhasnoi]

when I'm paying to play it too?

(This comes from someone who has never played an MMPORG, as I've got enough subscription-based services to take care of, like electricity, food, web access, and smokes.)

Re:Why do I have to buy the game...

[rhsanborn]

Because you will buy the game and pay it too. They make a lot MORE money if they can sell the software and the subscription. As long as we keep paying it, they'll keep selling it.

Re:Why do I have to buy the game...

[gl4ss]

extra income.

that way they get it to store shelves too, giving it more visibility.

(personally though the breaking point in these games for me is the "killing rats in the sewers" syndrome aka killing boring monster/enemies/whatever to advance levels)

Re:Why do I have to buy the game...

[bugnuts]

I can answer that :)

The development of a MMORPG client/server takes about as much work as a single-player game. Plus the packaging and distribution are about the same. But the MMORPG developer's duties are not done with just the sale of the game. Unlike the single-player game dev, the MMORPG game dev must supply

• Servers
• Sysadmins for the servers
• Bandwidth (lots!)
• and content updates to keep your playerbase playing.

An interesting data point I read in an interview is that Cryptic (makers of COH) will not be in the black until next year sometime even with 180k people giving them $15/mo.

Re:Why do I have to buy the game...

[ComputerSherpa]

Yep, I can see how it would be expensive. OTOH, Eve Online lets you DL the entire client for free (assuming your connection is fast enough to make this option viable). Zero packaging and distribution costs. ;-)

Re:Why do I have to buy the game...

[Mex]

I imagine this is similar to cable companies charging you a small fee for installation, and then a monthly fee.

Re:Why do I have to buy the game...

[zokrath]

The upkeep costs associated with massive online games have already been mentioned, but I would like to point out that even at fifteen dollars a month, Online games are still a far better dollar to entertainment hour purchase than three matinees a month. Perhaps not as cost effective as a game such as Diablo II, but the online component and long term patching ate considerably into Blizzard's profits, and I doubt that Diablo III will be similar in that regard.

Re:Why do I have to buy the game...

[superpulpsicle]

This is the part that always baffle me. Eventually wouldn't there be a shortage of audience?! There are a ton of MMORPGs released every year. It sounds like the same people that play COH also play Everquest for example. Wouldn't companies eventually fear making new games because there isn't millions of new audience every month.

Re:Why do I have to buy the game...

[MacroRex]

Also City of Heroes can be bought as a pure download. You register on the web page, pay the fee (I used Visa) and get the reg key you can use when installing the download.

I guess paying for the game itself isn't just covering the packaging and S&H, it's just what the market is prepared to do to get playing. A business without competition (I mean nobody else can sell CoH) will try to charge the customer exactly as much they're willing to pay.

It'll be interesting to see how well Guild Wars (another NCSoft MMOG) is going to do, as it's going to the opposite direction. No monthly fees at all, you pay only for the initial game package and periodical expansion packs. The theory is that the expansion packs are purely optional, but I'm very sceptic about this. I started my MMOG habit about six months ago with Everquest, and mostly because the numerous expansion packs the gap between a starting character and high-end one was huge. One of the reasons I went to CoH was that there was no expansions yet. Guild Wars has to be very careful about this, lest to make the game very daunting for starting players after a few expansions.

Re:Why do I have to buy the game...

[Photon Ghoul]

Actually, offering a several-hundred megabyte install file for download does cut down on the packaging costs but not so for distribution as bandwidth isn't free usually.

Re:Why do I have to buy the game...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true, there have been two expansions since COH's release. They're free! It's one of the many reasons that CoH rawks so hard.

Re:Why do I have to buy the game...

[Ewan]

It's already starting to happen, major MMORPGs have been cancelled in the last few months because the publishers decided that they'd never get their money back with so much competition.

I hate subjects for asking questions :p

[DragonPup]

Is Geko still nerfing accuracy? Kidding, kidding.

Real question: Looking back at CoH's development, if there was one thing you wished you did differently, what would it be and why?

The next evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello!

A few years ago before massive multi player online games became popular I tried to get a group of friends working towards the creation of such a game. It was all for vain. Having been working on these for years now, where do you see the next big leap in gaming or massive multi player games?

Boring Games

[rlandrum]

I've played MMO's, and I haven't been impressed. I think some of the lingo speaks for itself ('grinding'). The last game I got into was Star Wars Galaxies. While technically the game was very nice, and the gameplay was decent, the game became extremely boring after only a few hours of gameplay.

I've also played games like Zelda, Occarina of Time (a classic), and the newer Zelda, Wind Waker. Both games contained a series of puzzles that needed to be solved before allowing the story to progress. It was this sense of achievement that made the games fun to play.

In MMO's, I have no sense of achievement. Obtaining the next skill level doesn't get me anywhere, it only makes me more powerful.

How will MMO's of the future fill this sense of achievement? Or do you see games progressing more towards the "Life simulator", like the Sims?

Re:Boring Games

[Sheetrock]

There is a problem with traditional RPG puzzles; MMORPGs allow collaboration or walkthroughs and the pressure to advance with your peers means that the individual player will most likely take the easy way out of puzzles to keep up, robbing him of the satisfaction of thinking things over and working at his own pace.

A Tale In The Desert takes an interesting approach where community-wide advancement and shaping of the game world is possible and encouraged, but the advancement of the individual character is a little flat (gather items to build stuff or travel someplace to get another skill.) In a way, this is a "life simulator".

Finding some means of bringing the two together is the way to go -- a potential future MMORPG would work out a system that randomizes the puzzles for each character, discover a way to permit characters with a wide range of 'levels' to adventure together meaningfully, and permit a very dynamic game world where players build their own towns and outposts and PvP becomes a little more epic.

Re:Boring Games

[Erik Hollensbe]

I'm not trying to plug someone else's game in this forum, but I have had immense success with FFXI and NWN.

The Missions and Quests in the game really take the "grind" off, although it's most certainly still there. But you have to get past the control interface on the PC first, which is really geared towards a Playstation controller.

Also, a good number of NWN games are architected in a way that makes levelling up a very gratifying experience.

Re:Boring Games

[Snaller]

Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822.3.

*DR* Spock? The famous pediatrician? Wow, he sounds a lot like that Vulcan guy from Startrek.

Future CoH comics

[leyf]

Not to knock the present CoH comic, but what are the chances of getting some 'name' talent to produce some issues in the CoH universe?

Re:Future CoH comics

[Tofino]

If you're not going to knock those comics, I will. They're pretty horrid. I do like the funny one-pagers at the back, though.

Re:Future CoH comics

[leyf]

Ok yeah. . I was trying to be nice.

Death penalty?

[claytongulick]

I understand that without some risk, death in a MMORPG would lose alot of the "tension" that game designerns feel that players need in order to stay "hooked". As a player, I can tell you that the exp penalty of dying is usually what ends up getting me to cancel an account. When I see all that debt/exp loss/penalty I start thinking "Why am I wasting my time here? Its a nice day outside..." Even the illusion of "exp debt" that CoH has still amounts to the same thing: total playing time added to make up for dying. Since death is frequently not a player's fault (lag, imbalance, etc...) I can tell you that I am very attracted the the approach that WoW is taking with having no death penalty other than travelling as a ghost back to your corpse. My question is this: What goes into the decision for death penalties? Has anyone actually asked the players if this is what they want?

Re:Death penalty?

[ZorbaTHut]

no death penalty other than travelling as a ghost back to your corpse

So, uh. "Getting killed and having to spend time making experience back is bad. But getting killed and having to spend time running back to your corpse is good!"

Both of them take time. How are they fundamentally different?

Would you really want to play a game where death is absolutely meaningless? Just get killed, who cares!

Re:Death penalty?

[bill_kress]

If you feel like it's an effort to regain your levels when you die--enough so to close your account--then thats exactly what you should do.

Also, if you die that rarely, either that game is amazingly lame or you are playing way too conservatively. If that really appeals to you you could save some money by looking at "Home for sale" VR tours, because spinning around in place is really all you're doing. If it helps you can click on furniture for points.

Re:Death penalty?

[Bios_Hakr]

I think a better penalty would be to not allow the user to login for 24 hours after a death vice taking exp.

Re:Death penalty?

[Minna Kirai]

Both of them take time. How are they fundamentally different?

Both 3 and 98 are numbers. How are they fundamentally different?

Suppose they let you ressurect yourself instandly by pushing F6. That takes time too! How is it fundamentally different?

Re:Death penalty?

[Minna Kirai]

I think a better penalty would be to not allow the user to login for 24 hours after a death vice taking exp.

Not only would that drive away customers, it could even get them named in lawsuits. They accepted money for a gameplaying service, and to intentionally bar a paying customer from said service is probably illegal in many areas.

Re:Death penalty?

[Godai]

Let's assume for a moment that the run back to your corpse in WoW is the same amount of time you'd need to grind mobs in CoH to get back the experience you lost (this will almost never be the case, in favour of WoW from what I've experienced, but let's do it for sake of argument).

In WoW, you mindlessly run back to your corpse to resurrect. The time is lost, but nothing else is.

In CoH, you HAVE lost something, and you have to work to get it back. Depending on where you grind, you'll have to work shorter or longer to get that experience back, but you HAVE lost it. Also, you could die again while regaining the lost experience and that will put you farther back!

So there is a difference. Personally I prefer the WoW way, I just wish they could come up with a system so that resurrection via player spell wasn't so undesirable except deep in dungeons :(

Re:Death penalty?

[ZorbaTHut]

Ah, but he's not saying "it should take less time". I would agree that WoW's penalty is quite a bit easier than CoH's. Well . . . most of the time. If you end up dead in a very nasty area it can be easier to resurrect back at the graveyard, and I forget if that's a 5% or a 10% xp penalty. CoH's penalty is a flat 5%. You'd also have to take into account how long a level actually is, of course - that's why the 10% xp penalty in FFXI is so incredibly brutal at high levels. (And why they have high-level raise spells.)

"Pushing F6" - yes, that takes time, but basically none. I realize that these are all "on a scale", so to speak, but my point is that WoW's scale really isn't all that different from CoH's in many cases.

Since, really, if you get killed, you're probably not getting killed in the middle of creatures ten levels lower than you are.

Re:Death penalty?

[ZorbaTHut]

Well, technically, CoH has a debt limit - I think it's half your total level. Some people end up permanently debt-limit capped because they suck, and/or are scrappers. :) In FFXI it is actually possible to die your way back to lv5 (at which point it stops taking away xp), but in CoH nothing of the sort can happen.

One other issue I see with WoW is that your team members have to sit around waiting for you to run back. In CoH you can be resurrected on the spot, although I'll admit as a healer with Resurrect I might have a skewed view of how common this is.

But yeah, there's a difference. I used to say CoH was the easiest on player death, but it looks like WoW has beaten them. ;) I suppose things like this just depend on which playerbase you're trying to attract - some people want a challenge, others want a cakewalk. Neither style is really intrinsically better, they just lend to different game types.

I can't think of any way to combine them in a single game either, because the players who want a challenge are going to want to be more powerful compared to those who are just breezing through. Bah.

Re:Death penalty?

[Bios_Hakr]

Then just don't allow them to earn experience for a 24 hour period. Take away their reason for 'powerleveling' and make them think twice before running into a group of 'mobs'.

Re:Death penalty?

[Minna Kirai]

If you end up dead in a very nasty area it can be easier to resurrect back at the graveyard,

That must be a fairly new change. According to Blizzard's previous annoucements, completing a corpse run will be quite trivial (except in the rare case of extra-special boss monsters). They say it should take no more than 10 minutes at the outside- and then, you can whip out a teleport item if the area is too dangerous to escape from.

5-10 minutes of ghost walking (when you're invisible, invulnerable, and extra-fast) is an insignificant punishment compared to losing 5% xp.

Re:Death penalty?

[Cus]

You could always exemplar someone - I believe all the xp gained goes straight into your debt account, and you'll get rid of the debt quicker. Also helps you toward the exemplar badge as well :-)

Re:Death penalty?

[ZorbaTHut]

Well, during my time at the beta, I found that while I could *usually* get back to my corpse without a problem, once in a while I took a wrong turn and ended up in the middle of a cluster of bad guys. Which was really really painful, and often I either didn't have a teleport item or it hadn't recharged yet.

And you don't move *that* extra fast, it's like twice as fast at most. :P At low levels 5% xp was actually faster to get by fighting things. ;)

Re:Death penalty?

[Anonymous Coward]

In CoH, you don't lose anything. You acquire debt. The fundamental difference between debt and xp loss is that you could play the game perpetually in debt, forever, and the absolute worst thing about that is that you would advance half as fast as if you were debt free.

If you just hit level 10, and then die, you have debt. You are still lvl 10. You still have exactly the same amount of xp. You still earn xp for every kill. Half goes toward advancement, half towards paying down debt. Its the gentlest form of death penalty I've ever heard of, and I don't see how WoWs is a quantum leap better.

Plus, there is a debt cap. Its equivalent to 10x the amount of debt you get for one defeat at your present level.

Debt seems to be a relative non-issue for me. You can't get debt until level 5. You can burn debt in a trivial amount of time until about the teens. I've burned down the debt cap with a puny controller with barely any offense at lvl 11 in a couple hours. Blasters and scrapper can do this in much less time. In the 20s, run a couple of missions, debt gone. Debt can get big (in the relative sense) in the 30s and 40s, but I've found that when running with a good team, debt seems to disappear when I'm not looking.

It should also be mentioned, the idea is not to see who's game has the weakest death-penalty. Death penalties are there to balance the risk/reward of the game. I'm sure most people wish there was just no penalty at all, but then, I'm sure most people wish they could play in god-mode, too.

Re:Death penalty?

[ACPosterChild]

That amounts to pretty much the same thing, unless you have a large item craft and sell aspect. Still, they could always point out that you could play another character while your "dead" one times out.

Re:Death penalty?

[destroy_all_monsters]

The problem as I see it, is that certain classes are disproportionately more likely to have debt. Scrappers and Blasters particularly.

I think it should be a bit more balanced even if you have to "cheat" by coding it so that death is less costly to those particular classes.

Re:Death penalty?

[nycbrujah]

Here's a reason why this won't work. There's always somebody going around, making live miserable for somebody else. IE: gathering large amounts of mobs and sicing them on a group of lower levels. Your now punishing a group of people for dieing through no fault of their own. Then there's the lag or server glitch issues as well. Then there's higher level charcters not taking care of their ambushes in lower level zones.
Also which each new level there is a slight learning curve as you push your limits to see if that new power or those new enahancements helped.

Death always sucks. Death from uncontrollable circumstanses is just plain rotten. Punishing people for things they can't control drives players away as well. I don't believe people should be punished for striving and testing their limits.

Debt is fine with me. It's not hard to work off and no matter what archtype I play, I rarely have permadebt.

Re:Death penalty?

[Bios_Hakr]

So, what you are saying is that permadeath and/or strong death penalties would force devs to actually dev a game? How often do you attack 'grays'? Why should a train of mobs care about 'gray' PCs? They shouldn't.

All the things you listed are probs hat devs should attend to. They piss people off in every game out there. Most devs ignore it and say it's my problem for 'idling' and not being aware of my surroundings.

Re:Death penalty?

[nycbrujah]

I don't think your following me.

Say a level 20 'hero' comes through and provokes several groups of lvl 10 mobs and keeps provoking them untill our level 20 'hero' finds a nice group of level 7's then stops provoking and leaves. Now you have twelve to thirty level 10 badguys overrunning a group level 7's who are already in a fight, resulting in the death of that group.

What your saying is that the unfortunate victems should not beable to earn XP for X amount of time, or not beable to log in with that character for X amount of time, as punishment for being in a zone their suposed to be in and playing how their suposed to be playing?

What can the devs do about this? Not much, the unfortunate players are with in three levels so it's not like the mobs are attacking things out of their range. If the devs say 'hey your powers don't work on any mob X number of levels beneath you, then that upsets a large percentage of your playerbase, because now they can't go back and work on those kill X ammount of whatever badges back from their low level days.

In case your wondering, I've been victem to this before, in which case, I just pick myself up, send a polite tell to the person asking them not to do it again, and work my debt off. If it happens to me again, or I see them do it to another group, I petition the name. I have also prevented it from happening to many groups as well, sending a polite tell to the aggressor asking them not to do it anymore. If I see them continue, their name gets petitioned.

And Yes, I do attack grey mobs when I'm hunting for a badge. I also make sure I'm not interfearing with any low level teams that are in the area when I do it as well. I like to play polite 'cuz that makes it fun for everyone, but I will not be a pushover, and I will not be punished for someone elses abuse.

Duping

[Anonymous Coward]

Duping seems to be the bane of many online role playing games. (Credit duping, item duping, etc.) What steps have you taken in CoH to avoid this problem?

Re:Duping

[Anonymous Coward]

Answer is easy: there are no items to dupe. In CoH there is no such thing as an inventory. There are enhancements, but those are so easy to come by why dupe?

Re:Duping

[Kaboom13]

I can answer that. CoH has no "rare" items, and the money is worthless, most lvl 40+ have enough to spare to buy every enhancement (the closest thing to an item in game, bought from the NPC shop) 100 times over. There is no parity in the money between levels, and lvl 50's often give away large sums of money for kicks. Any effort put into duping could have just as easily been spent getting one high level char and using it for all your money needs.

skeptical of the genre

[oprahjesserafael]

I've tried MMOGs before to little satisfaction. I am skeptical of the entire genre, is there anything City of Heroes can do lure players like me that normally will not have anything to do with MMOGs?

MMO Competition

[servognome]

With several highly anticipated MMOs launching this year and next year (WoW, EQ2, Matrix Online), what is your perception of competition in the MMO industry, has it become too crowded? Do you believe new games can be supported by drawing new players into the genre, or will these games pull mostly from the existing player base?

Quick question

[Buttercup]

Is COH just a graphical MUD, or is there something I missed? They seem to have added a lot of cool effects to the combat. Other than that, I'm not sure what this guy "designed". Seriously. Christ, they even call the monsters "mobs". What's different?

Re:Quick question

[Blakey Rat]

And I suppose that it's impossible that MUD gameplay can be designed either, huh?

Thanks for telling me I've been wasting the last 7 years.

What a stupid question.

Class system

[CrashPoint]

I recall reading a couple of years ago that you didn't want CoH to use a class system. But with "archetypes" that define the powersets available to a character, that's essentially what happened. What made you feel this system was necessary, rather than a more freeform system where players could simply choose their powersets from all those available in the game?

Re:Class system

[kosanovich]

This question has been answered by him before. Basically when they had it free form it allowed those who knew what they were doing (power gamers) to become super powerful and the casual gamer ended up gimping themselves more often than not. At the time there was no respec possible so all the people who didn't know EXACTLY what to choose were very vocally upset so they changed it to make it more friendly to the average person and balance things out a bit.

Re:Class system

[Azerphale]

I'm an avid CoH player and I hafta say that defining AT's (archetypes) as classes is a little bit of a misnomer.

You can play like a blaster (heavy damage) even if you start out as a defender (healer/buffing AT). Just look at bubble/energy offenders.

As a tanker you can be an extremely effective melee combatant often outpacing scrappers (melee heavy damage dealers) in terms of damage dealt.

Controllers can fulfill the role of a defender quite easily as well.

And all of the power pool options allow anyone to become a decent melee fighter/healer/buffer.

AT's are extremely flexible and give characters a strong base to build on unlike the disheveled all-class advancement of SWG.

I think they probably decided that narrowing people to AT's would lessen the learning curve of the already innovative character creation and advancement in CoH.

Not trying to flame, just saying I don't think you're giving AT's the props they deserve.

Re:Class system

[ACPosterChild]

Yes, but it sounds like a cop-out to me. Maybe I'm being overly harsh, but one of the biggest reasons I wanted to play CoH was because they weren't going to force the characters into the typical Tank, Mage, and Healer roles. Then, they changed their minds, and the game feels pretty much exactly like any D&D game. The travel powers add some divergent novelty, and you can't discount those because you have to do a LOT of running around, especially if you are doing a Task Force or trying to find a shop that you can't remember the exact location of.

Sorry, but I can't believe that with all the effort they put into re-doing the skill system that they couldn't have come up with a reasonable way to limit newbies to certain combinations and still allow the flexibility they originally advertised. Reading his responses, I got the very distinct impression that he didn't like the tank-mage soloers because they don't fit his view of what a MMORPG experience should be, so they implemented the typical class system to force grouping.

Here's a question: Why can't you auto-cash the enhancements you pick up, instead of having to carry them back and sell them?
This would help gameplay quite a bit, and allow you to hold on to enhancements until the next level without having to sacrifice all your cashflow.

Here's another: Why can't you un-train skills?
[removed a big rant about all the reasons, which should be obvious to any MMORPG player anyway]

The answers seem simple and obvious: This stuff adds to the timewasting treadmill, and, thus, to revenue. Same as the Task Force missions that have you running from one end of a zone to the other end of another, just to get some information from somebody (which is to run back to where you just were for more info, or, if you're lucky, a fight).

I pre-ordered CoH, and played it for a good while. But, not being able to untrain skills has actually made me afraid to level my many 13-18s up any higher because I don't want to permenantly screw them up. And it's not that I'll pick one bad skill. It's that, with every pick, I have a good chance of regretting it forever, and in the end my character will be a mishmash of uncomplimentary and non roleplay-matched skills. (the latter due to poor descriptions that aren't even consistent between char-gen and in-game)

Yeah, I'm still paying my monthly fee, even though I haven't played in 3 months. But, that will probably change this month. Same as with SW Galaxies. The only reason I held onto it for so long was because they promised to actually finish the game they advertised they were selling (adding mounts, etc.). Too little too late there.

Re:Class system

[kosanovich]

"But, not being able to untrain skills has actually made me afraid to level my many 13-18s up any higher because I don't want to permenantly screw them up."

Since you haven't playing in 3 months you probably haven't kept up with the issues, but they have added respec as of about a month ago. I personally quit shortly after it was added, but if that's your only reason for not playing then you may be interested to know that you can now respec (albeit you have to respec all your skills from lvl 1, you have to do a taskforce to get the respec, and you can only get it beginning at lvl 20, then again at 30 and 40)

Re:Class system

[ACPosterChild]

Yeah, I've heard a little about it. I guess that helps some. If there were a good way to try skills out before picking them permanently, that would make me happy.

cross-influences?

[ed.han]

mr. emmert:

as a pen & paper gamer myself, i'd be curious to know your opnion on just how transferable traditional RPG skill-sets are vs PC or console-based skill-sets, beyond the obvious things like coding, etc. i'm also curious to know what pen & paper designers would you consider most influential on your own work, beyond dave arneson & gary gygax of course.

ed

Super Speed

[claytongulick]

In a game where super speed is one of the 4 travel powers, why did you design levels that are impossible for players with SS to get around in? (Terra Volta, Faultline etc...)

Re:Super Speed

[wrong]

Why are some levels difficult with Super Speed? So you have a reason to get Super Jump, Teleport, or Fly (or at least Hover).

Hazard zones like Terra Volta and Faultline are meant for groups, so there's a much better chance someone will have Recall Friend and be able to bail your ass out of a large hole. Also, Cryptic have been very good about making sure that a character without travel powers can walk out of anything they can get into, although you will probably have to fight a lot of foes to do it and the route is not always obvious.

Re:Super Speed

[claytongulick]

Can someone explain why this is modded troll? There are alot of people in the game who ask the same question all the time, and in fact SS is avoided by alot of players for that exact reason. It wasn't intended to be a troll, I think it is a legit question about game design decision.

Re:Super Speed

[Bobartig]

I have friends who navigated Faultline and TerraVolta only using SS. My friend (who followed me around w/ SS as I SJ'ed all over) couldn't figure out what the "wimps" were complaining about. He had to take the scenic route, but he could always get to where I was.

Now shadowshard is supposedly much harder to get around w/o SS, but I haven't gone there yet.. too much other content in the early 40's for me to pull away from just yet.

How are things now?

[deanj]

I left CoH after being in beta and signing up for the first month. They game was interesting, but it didn't have that "hook" that other MMORPGs have had for me. There just didn't seem that there was much to do, other than beat up the thugs. I know other people who have since quit CoH feel the same.

What's in CoH now that you feel would be a good reason to come back and what do you have planned in upcoming expansions that might keep me coming back?

Re:How are things now?

[Bobartig]

If you missed Updates 1 and 2, then you've missed quite a bit.

Update 1 added costume changes, a raise in maximum level to 50, several new city zones, such as Peregrin Island, outdoor instanced missions (more mission variety), new villain groups, new tiles sets,

Update 2 was HUGE:

Added a badge system where you collect badges for completing certain missions, completing task forces, visiting certain areas, reading history plaques, accomplishing certain tasks (healing, being mezzed, paying debt, taking dmg, earning influence, etc.), killing certain enemies. Collecting certain combinations of badges will give you an Accolade which provides a permenant additional power, or a boost to your HP/End.

Added several trials such as Eden Trial, Terra Volta trial (allows character respecification), Cavern of Transcendance trial, several taskforces

Added Capes and Body Auras for character customization

Added new zones, The Hollows, Shadow Shard/Firebase Zulu

Basically if you've missed both patches, you'd hardly recognize the game from all the changes its undergone. The content patches have been quite amazingly huge.

Plans for the future include Epic Archetypes (Kheldians, accessible by having a lvl 50 character, and possibly other means), expanding existing power pools to include new abilities, and a Out of Combat experience system referred to as skills, which would be long term abilities one could develop and improve on their characters (dubbed CoH's answer to crafting).

People who complain about lack of content in CoH tend to be people who burned through the content when the game was released (and there wasn't enough), and continue to complain about it now. the game is only about half a year old! Still, they've pushed 2 huge content patches (free), two special Paragon City invasions, and lots more in the works. I expect in 6 more months, CoH will contain enough content to satisfy those hardcore MMO players who dislike being able to burn through everything in 6 weeks (playing 12+ hours a day, naturally).

Re:How are things now?

[deanj]

I'm not saying there wasn't content....I was saying that the content seemed to all be "go beat this up".

Update 2 sounds interesting though.

Content updates

[Uriel]

CoH is the first game I've noticed since Asheron's Call to really provide large amounts of new content on an ongoing basis. That's great. So far we've seen amazing amounts of new stuff. Will there be new powers or costume pieces any time soon?

Game Infrastructure

[chiph]

180,000 players is lot of people -- obviously, not all of them are online at the same time. But even so, what's the backend of the game like to handle that number of players?

Do you have redundant servers to handle systems failure? Are they geographically dispersed to avoid "backhoe" cable cuts? What are some of the operational challenges involved with running a Massive Multiplayer game?

Chip H.

Re:Game Infrastructure

[Anonymous Coward]

They have a nice system of spawning a duplicate zone.

For example
"Atlas Park"
"Atlas Park2"

Same zones but people in different zones. Seems to work quite well. All dungeons are instanced dungeons as well which helps deal with lag.

Christopher Reeve

[12ftguru]

Any chance we might see a Christopher Reeve statue somewhere in Paragon city?

Instances

[TheOnlyJuztyn]

We are starting to see a new trend in MMORPGs wherein certain aspects of the game take place entirely in personal (or group) instances. COH, WoW, and many other games are doing this on a small scale, but the up-and-coming Guild Wars takes this idea to the max. What are your thoughts on the role of instances in the future of online games? Aren't they taking the 'Massive' out of Massively Multiplayer?

MMO's and Death Penalties - whats the infatuation?

[whitebread]

So I suit up in my tights, and head out for an evening of fighting crime. In said evening, I may see the hospital 1, 5, or 20 times. In CoH, the death penalty (the hospital) is much more forgiving than in games past, where you might have to retrieve your corpse and all your gear, lose experience, lose levels, or even permanently lose items, but it still seems like a mechanic that needs some real serious foreward thinking.

I guess my question is, whats the infatuation that MMO games in general seem to have with dying (ok, losing)? Is it to force grouping with healers? Is it to protect higher level content from lower level characters? Can the bright shining minds in the game development world not get past this age old issue, and give us some really well designed new mechanic? Unconsciousness, stat loss, or perhaps even something as progressive as losing control of your character as his mind enters a strange psychosis, and the AI forces your character to flee to safety. To me, any roleplaying game should encourage the hero to actually survive!

Any Plans to Adapt the COH Engine to Other Genres?

[Phrogman]

Do you have any plans for development of another MMORPG - possibly Fantasy or SF based - using the City of Heroes game engine?

This subject just came up today as a discussion on one of the gaming boards in fact. Many current players of City of Heroes who posted there seemed to think they would be very interested in the possibility of a Fantasy-based MMORPG using the same game engine. Obviously, when adapting it to a new genre many changes would be required.

Cryptic has shown they can think outside the box and push the envelope in MMO design, it would be very interesting to see what they could do with the more traditional MMORPG genres if they put their mind to it.

I would love to see a 3 realms at war style game a la Dark Age of Camelot based on the COH design and interface...

City of Heroes on Linux

[a3217055]

I was wondering if City of Heroes ( which I played at a friends house ) can be available on for a Linux x86 based system? I seem to have used up all my money making my 100% Linux compatiabale Athlon 64 and so did not have any money to buy a Microsoft Windows License.

Re:City of Heroes on Linux

[claytongulick]

I've had it working with WineX (Cedega or whatever) without any problems.

Re:City of Heroes on Linux

[E-Sabbath]

City of Heroes can be played using WinE. Er. Cedega. Whichever. Either the free or expensive version.

Re:City of Heroes on Linux

[sfranklin]

Already answered:

CoH Forums Linux thread

Re:City of Heroes on Linux

[thunderbird tim]

This is a link to a thread on the main boards for getting CoH to work on Linux.
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.ph p?Cat=&B oard=faq&Number=1623182&Forum=All_Forums&Words=win e&Searchpage=0&Limit=250&Main=1623182&Search=true& where=bodysub&Name=&daterange=1&newerval=&newertyp e=w&olderval=&oldertype=&bodyprev=#Post1623182

Demo / Trial?

[InfinityWpi]

As a gamer geek but also a new father and a victim of the economy, I have to be very careful with my 'entertainment' money. I've heard good things about CoH, but I can't justify buying the game if I'm only going to be playing it for a month (I can really only justify that with $15 bargain-bin titles). Will CoH have a one-week (or, better, two-week) trial available in the near future?

Second question, if I may: Everyone talks about how MMORPGs are different from 'traditional' RPGs mainly due to the lack of a strong, world-changing storyline. Granted, comics aren't always world-changing except for the occasional crossover, but you never see Superman's secret identity being revealed to the world in the pages of, say, JLA. Comics have a definite 'solo' vs 'group' theme going. Is it possible to really have a single-character-changing experience in CoH, or is it all mainly "Nothing major will happen; this isn't hos book" vibe?

Re:Demo / Trial?

[shuut]

I played CoH for almost a month and leveled to 26 as a blaster that uses guns and gadgets. As far as I can tell there's no single-character-changing experience going on, you kill the guy to get xp, and repeat, the type of villians you will have to kill depends on the type of your hero, and that's all the game will decide for you. Also the world changing experneices for individual players are implemented as one time "group missions", which are superhard missions that must be taken by a group of players, and these mission are level limited so they basically happen in every 5 level or so starting at level 20. In the mission you goes to a warehouse and kill a archvillian of a given gang. And that's basically it, nothing will be done to the gang as they still walk around the streets.

Re:Demo / Trial?

[Anonymous Coward]

$50 for the game, then $15 per month seems a little steep at first, but compare it to anything else. Lets say you play 2 hours a day, that's 60 hours per month. If you want 60 hours of playtime per month on normal games, you will have to buy 2 - 3 FPS, or 1 - 2 decent RPG's. That's $50 - $150 to go that route. Or you can go to the movies once a night at $10 a pop, that's $300 (even renting a movie at $3 each is $90).

Sure, shelling out $50, then an additional $15/mo seems like quite a bit, but you get more than your moneys worth. Good feture updates that add at least 2 new zones every 2 - 3 months, multiple character slots (the ability to creat approx 100 differant toons), and LIVE people to play with. Oh, and you dont have to pay for the updates like you do with some games. I have about 250 hours on my main, and 5 or 6 alts with at least 10 hours on each. Now assuming I've been playing for 4 months, I have payed a total of $95 for 300+ hours of entertainment. Please tell me where I can get a better deal than that? =]

This game also would take ALOT longer than a month to see most of the content. It has very good story driven missions. Each contact has a long storyarc (3 - 4 hours at least) that you can go through, there are task forces (7) and trials (4) that require large groups and take 3 - 9 hours. So even if you did get the game and work your character up to level 50, doing all missions, you'd spend 300+ hours playing.

Re:Demo / Trial?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not a victim. You are an adult. Especially if you're a father, it's time to grow up and take responsibility for your life.

Let me repeat this advice. Not for you (you may be a lost cause), but for your child:

Grow up.

Assume responsibility for yourself.

Super Groups

[jdehnert]

Besides moral support, and you need a good group to even get that, when will Super Groups provide some additional functionality?

Priorities

[Dragoon412]

City of Heroes had a fantastic beta, with much communication with the dev team, and a sense that the game was truly moving forward.

However, almost immediately after release, issues regarding aspects of the game that had been widely known, reported, and even confirmed by developers to be working correctly during beta (i.e. Super Speed, Hasten) were quite savagely nerfed. Along with those nerfs was a change to the con system that drastically slowed the pace of advancement in the game.

One expects MMOGs to be in a state of perpetual change, but the severity of the changes made were practically unprecedented in the genre. What changed between beta and release that made those specific issues such a priority and warranted such a drastic change?

Re:Priorities

[Illserve]

Well CoH needed some help, I'll grant him that big changes were necessary. I don't think they were the right ones but...

I'll get to a question at the end of this, but first some background:

In most games, devs shy away from lavishing players with too many Area Effect powers because it's obvious that they can be heavily abused if piled together by a whole party. In CoH we find the opposite, area effect stuns, slows, debuffs, and most importantly damage on a great number of templates.

We deliberately put together a party of primarily Area Effect powers and let me tell you, it was awe inspiring. We'd jump into a group of purples, drop our payload and they'd keel over in seconds, except for the bosses who had to be handled personally.

And if we were facing orange/reds, all of them dropped almost immediately. We were levelling like crazy, sometimes we'd split off to fight a second group of reds at the same time. It was..... boring

EQ taught us one lesson, a game has to be difficult to maintain player interest. CoH was not, it was child's play for any group of cracking gamers who know how to browse the list of powers for the good combos. We were just one of many.

That, more than anything, led to me quitting the game.

So my question is this: did you set out to make a game that was far easier than most MMORPG's are? Perhaps to create a game that is more accessible to the casual gamer?

Or was it a failure of imagination on the part of the balance committee to understand how catastrophically broken these power combos could be?

Re:Priorities

[ACPosterChild]

It was probably realization that not many of today's gamers have 6 friends to stack a team with that can play together on such a very basis, and getting a group of random people like that together is difficult and time consuming. I.E., the majority of the users aren't going to try and play the system like that.

Re:Priorities

[ACPosterChild]

I don't know for sure in this case, but most MMORPG betas have the difficulty turned way down so that the testers will be able to test much more content in much less time than paying customers. The developers might think a power is working OK, but the marketers say "hmm, if you slow the travel powers down by 10%, it will take them that much longer to do what they want, and we'll make that much more money", and changes are made.

Re:Priorities

[rwells]

Actually not really true in CoH. I played for several months, during the period where Fire Blasters were Uber (Main AoE Damage class). And every single person you ran into was a Fire Blaster pretty much. It was practicaly impossible not to form a group of all AoE characters. There were many evenings that I would group with 3 - 4 Fire blasters and thats it no other classes. Just like the parent poster mentioned we droup entire crowds of bad guys with the opening blow. Eventually I stopped needing the other blasters at all and simply took on giant crowds of Yellow and Orange mobs solo. 2 shots, move ot next group. So I too dropped CoH pretty quickly.

Re:Priorities

[ACPosterChild]

Hmm, I never really ran into that, and only saw it once. I played a fair bit on a number of servers, usually with ranged chars, and one fire spec. *shrug*

Train and Time Travel

[a3217055]

I am not quite sure how City of Heroes is set up and it seems that you cannot leave City-1 and go to City-2 due to some reason or the other. I was wondering if you could travel by a Train over a period of days there, so all the database stuff can be synced up and you won't loose your character ?
Another thing that I think would be cool if their was something like your City of Heroes Character can go back in time to and save people or get teleported back into the past and have some sort of story along those lines. But definately CoH is a kick ass game.

How to balance input?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you follow the CoH forums you notice a small positive opinion and plenty of negative. That information is also from a relatively small number of people that may or may not be playing the game.

How do you and your staff sift that input to find valid points against the noise?

Why not just read GaminGroove.com's interview?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read it. Then Slashdot can get back to something more fresh.

Biggest surprise after launch?

[DevNova]

Since the official launch, can you think of something that really, really surprised you about the game? Did the players start to do things you didn't expect, or did some game mechanics/results turn out far differently than you thought it would (for better or worse)?

I think you're thinking of WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure that the feature you're thinking of is in World of Warcraft, not City of Heroes.

That said, it's still a somewhat valid question if you tweak it a little: Since CoH has a few features built in to level playingfields and generally feels a little more slanted towards the casual player than other MMORPGs, why didn't it include a system like the one in WoW where it encourages players to go out and get some air/sleep/food?

So what game(s) do you play the most?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you play your own game, do you play other massively multiplayer games, consoles, board games, or do you just like to design em??

When you do play are you a 'serious' gamer, or are you playing causually, or are you playing as a professional who has an stake in keeping up with what is going on in the gaming industry?

What do you think of the how other games have handled trying to avoid the 'level grinding' like A Tale in the Desert and Puzzle Pirates?

Biggest challenge?

[DevNova]

Aside from capes, what was the most challenging part/element of designing CoH?

Who decided no cape and why?

[lashi]

Yeah, why were capes left out of the earlier versions? An oversight or some sort of technical hurdle?

The new cape animation is pretty good.

Fees

[Anonymous Coward]

Alot of the complaints and concerns about MMORPGs resolve around the ongoing monthly fees. Can you give us any idea of how these fee's are spent?

ie. What portion pays for the servers, and the content development.

I know exact values aren't likely, but I've always wondered how much of that fee goes back directly into maintenance and content development.

Real-life.

[Mac Degger]

What's stopping more real-life equivalents from crossing over into MMORPG's?

I'll give an examples to illustrate my point:
-griefers are a problem; why not allow either (part of) the dedicated live team or 'the good players' (meaning those who play a lot and have good community standing [you dev's know who your cream of the crop are] and maybe an innate sense of fairness) to become cops or peacekeepers within the game? Give 'em not-exactly-admin powers, but enough to grief a griefer (maybe after being called up on an ingame 'hotline' and judging the situation).

My point is really that MMORPG's have real-world problems...so why not use more tried and true real-life solutions?

Re:Real-life.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the case of griefers, the reason there aren't police in CoH, is that they have a GOOD DESIGN.

Griefing in MMOs occurs because players exploit design flaws. If your design says that mean monsters will get mad at a player, then follow him across the level when he flees (despite an inability to catch up or hurt that player), and finally decide to attack people standing near the "zone entrance" when the person they were mad at before goes through it, you'll have a problem. (A worse problem if the monsters just attack whoever is closest, and can be simply led to another player). CoH does not have this problem (or a lot of the other problems) because the design of the game is better.

"Training" (described above) doesn't occur because monsters don't stay angry indefinitely, stop following once following becomes ridiculous, don't become angry at other players on a whim, and get killed before entering the "safe areas" around a zone entrance. (good design).

"Spawn Camping" doesn't really occur because most "quest items" are recovered from instanced dungeons. If me and player X both get the mission to "find an artifact" then we'll be sent to different instances of the mission so that we won't meet up at the artifact and have to argue over who brings it back to it's owner. I can still have somebody help me (players on a team enter the same instanced dungeon) but if I want to do it alone, nobody will be able to bother me. Some missions ask you to wander the streets and defeat X members of some group, but the number of criminals waiting to be defeated is so large that camping is uncommon in these instances as well. It's easier to find a new group to kill than it is to wait for the group you just killed to respawn.

"Kill Stealing" can occur to a small degree (experince is split based on damage done to the enemy), but usually doesn't. First, because the experience is split between every team who damaged it (teams split it evenly), it's really more like "kill sharing" than kill stealing. Second, the reasons to do this are less prevalent since there are TONS of "monsters" and they occur in a large enough variety of places that there's no "spawn camping" (see above). Third, if it's still a problem, instanced dungeons allow you to go to an area where other players cannot disrupt you (though you can still bring teammates along). So the design makes it range from impossible (when in dungeons) to very diffucult and not worthwhile (in the open areas of the city).

So, in general, griefing is not a problem in CoH. In fact, in playing I've been HELPED (in ways that don't steal experience) MUCH more frequently than anybody has ever tried to harm me. This is because CoH was designed well, and griefing is an exploit of design FLAWS.

A better question for Stateman would be, "What sort of steps did you take in designing the game to both predict and solve the kinds of problems that are typical in MMOs, such as griefers? In what ways is it easier to prevent these things in games than it is in real life?"

Re:Real-life.

[Mac Degger]

It's more of a general question: I've never played CoH, but I do know that in many MMORPG's griefing (which I define as a high level character fucking a low level character [don't bother, Trolls: you know /exactly/ what I mean]) occurs.

What I want to ask an actual designer of MMORPG's is why that kind of thing hasn't been implemented, because it could negate the 'PvE vs. PvP' discussion: That discussion only occurs because of people abusing it.

Furhtermore, there are many examples I didn't give (either becuase they're so far out, or because I wanne be a gamedev at one point too ;P), like setting up the dev's as gods: imagine an MMORPG where there is something wrong in the gamebalance, which doesn't come up in forums (or maybe does, whatever). Now imagine someone pissed off enough to actually make a journey to the gods to complain. Screw forums: let the ingame character make that journeyt. If someone (or a group...hell, the larger the group the better!) thinks it's important enough to trouble the gods (who could have representatives ingame, for example a couple of live-team dev's posing as 'disciples' or priests or whatever, or even having msg's to those priests flagged and forwarded to the emails of those dev's)...

Anyway, imagine someone thought an issue important enough to take the trouble to finish an entire ingame quest...not only would it be cool that you could do that, but to actually have the dev's take something like that seriously...instant player gratification and instant newbies (who would resist a game where you could petition the 'gods').
Now I know something like this isn't a sinecure. It doesn't fix everything that is broken. But the player reward, the player investment...the fixes possible to the gameworld if/when a dev takes this seriously enough to actually consider it...just remeber that an MMORPG only works if peop[le buy into it...and that only happens if they think they have an investment in the world.

Man, maybe I'll reply coherently enough when I'm sober and have dealt with my break-up :P

Re:Real-life.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because a MMO deals with different constraints than real-life. Police and Justice works IRL because humans fear death, suffering, need love and happiness and have only one life.

None of this can really exist in an MMO.

You cannot kill or jail a griefer. You can at best destroy his current character. If he's dedicated enough he can just buy another account and start anew.
And griefers have very little emotional ties to their characters since they're playing a metagame : Pissing off other gamers.

On the other hand, giving griefing powers to a player invites abuse.
Being a cop in such games would be mostly a thankless task with the main reward being griefing those you dislike.

A shrewd griefer (and some ARE shrewd) could very well feign being a perfect citizen, try to get "cop" status then embark in an orgy of abuse. Same with a disgruntled player.

Re:Real-life.

[Moraelin]

Well, I have played CoH and a bunch of other MMORPGs, and many years on MUDs before. Not saying that to brag, just saying that (A) I do understand what you mean about griefing, and (B) the grandparent poster was right: COH _is_ designed to prevent griefing.

The thing is, most MUDs and MMORPGs are either (A) designed by not caring about griefing at all (see the first years of UO, where idiotic "realism" excuses took precedence over the players' real problems) or (B) designed by griefers for griefers.

It's like with buffer overflows or security: griefing is something that designers seem to ignore until it comes and bites them in the ass. Or even after it's bitten them in the ass. (Origin ignored it long after it cost it its market leader position in MMOs.)

I've only seen two MMO games so far which were designed from the ground up to prevent griefing, as much as physically possible: City of Heroes and Sega's Phantasy Star Online.

Admittedly, PSO was even more effective, in that there was literally _nothing_ you could do to harm a player. You couldn't even stand in a door to block their retreat. Training monsters? Didn't work either, since anything more than 10-20 ft or so would require them to go through a door, and they simply couldn't go through doors. Tricking newbies into dangerous areas? Nope, teleporting back to safety was always a button click away. (Plus, again, wheth they were in over their head, they only needed to run back through a door. Monsters couldn't follow through doors.) Stealing newbies' XP? Nope. As long as they still got at least one hit in (fairly easy with a pistol or rifle), they got xp too. Etc.

Sega had done an amazingly thorough design work there.

(In all fairness, PSO was more vulnerable to cheating, but still... even if you cheated yourself to be godly, you still couldn't harm or inconvenience another player with it. Which kept griefers away.)

CoH isn't that thorough about it, but still, you can tell that they gave the problem a lot of thought.

And generally, I say that's the right direction that a game should take. Instead of recruiting vigilante mobs of players to police against problems, the problems should be solved or prevented by the code whenever possible. It's possible. It just needs lots of work.

Re:Real-life.

[destroy_all_monsters]

I like the idea of in-game mods and devs as characters. I think the interactivity of it would add a great deal to the game. Something akin to a live Positron et al. Plus I think people would be jazzed to run into Statesman et al. every now and then.

Re:Real-life.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now imagine someone pissed off enough to actually make a journey to the gods to complain. Screw forums: let the ingame character make that journeyt. If someone (or a group...hell, the larger the group the better!) thinks it's important enough to trouble the gods (who could have representatives ingame, for example a couple of live-team dev's posing as 'disciples' or priests or whatever, or even having msg's to those priests flagged and forwarded to the emails of those dev's)...

The problem with this is that in forums everyone has an equal voice. By making it an in game mission of sorts you are basically creating a system where the only people who will have a chance to bend a dev ear are power-gaming guilds.

Developer made content vs user made content?

[Gldm]

Recently I started a thread on the COH suggestion forums that got a high rating about wanting a new ski area zone after having seen how ice worked in one of the missions I played. I also mentioned in a later post if there was a map editing tool I'd probably make it myself.

Do you think most future MMORPGs are going to stay with the developer-based content model like COH and Everquest, or do you think we'll begin seeing more user-based content such as in Second Life?

Do you think Cryptic will ever release some kind of content editor (aside from the already incredible character creator) to the users?

Anarchy Online has no real XP-loss death penalty.

[Morgaine]

All XP lost on death in AO (which could be zero anyway because you can insure at any time) goes into a death pool, and it just comes back out to you in large chunks whenever you earn XP, so there is never any XP actually lost.

It's kind of fun to get huge amounts of XP back per kill while you still have XP in your death pool. Very good solution.

Maybe suggest that for CoH?

European Launch?

[Zedrick]

Huh? I live in Europe, and I played the game from the beginning - got the box two days after the release IIRC. How is it not launched in Europe yet? The only thing is that we can't get the comic book thing that they offer in the US, but that's not really a big loss.

making your game stand out from the crowd

[cats-paw]

Now that MMORPG's are a "genre", making your version stand out from the crowd has got to be a challenge.

So is it 1% perspiration and 99% inspiration, the opposite, or somewhere in-between ?

Perils of Design.

[Alkaiser]

Two-parter:

What's the biggest misconception the general public seems to have about the job of Lead Designer, and what's the best path for me to take to get your job? (you know, like, at a different company...heh.)

Influence

[Mir322]

While not books regarding gaming, or programming, or even networking, the below noted books by James Jerome Gibson have a fascinating collection of thoughts i've always thought highly relevant to anyone creating cyberspaces that are 3D in nature.

Have you read them and found them useful in your MMO development work?

Gibson, James Jerome (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, Boston : Houghton Mifflin.

Gibson, James Jerome, (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston : Houghton Mifflin.

----------

Same reason you pay your other utilities....

[Viewsonic]

The cost of upkeep of the service. Like your cable bill, connecting to their servers, using their bandwidth, and getting their content costs a lot of money. Also the online support people need to be paid to help stuck people, etc.. You can't expect someone to sell a million copies and expect that revune to last 5 years later paying all these salaries that NEED to be around to maintain the hardware, helpdesk, and bandwidth .. It just isn't possible.

Guild Wars will try a unique model where there wont have a monthly fee, but they'll have lots of expansions to keep people paying money in. Either way, you gotta front the cash with these types of games.

Re:Same reason you pay your other utilities....

[Anonymous Coward]

After playing the Guild Wars preview this weekend, I have to say to them: Good Luck.

The game is so basic, so simple (even more so that CoH) that I could NEVER see paying for it per month, which is probably why it will be free per month. There is little to no strategy in fighting, the crafting system is simply a matter of "do I have enough parts for displayed recipe X" and everybodies character (this last thing may have just been an artifact of the preview weekend) looked exactly the same in a given class...

In my opinion (and the opinion of the 4 other people I played the preview with this weekend) the game needs a lot of work before it would be something I'd spend any time on.

Getting in?

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of us who are programmers, and would be interested in getting into developing a MMO, what would be the best way to get into the industry?

Currently, any game company will give you the canned response -- "you need experience building games and must have shipped X megahits"...etc. -- but unless you've been developing games your whole life, this is impossible. What route did you take to get into your position, and would it be viable for others?

Completely wrong! EQ has an "end game".

[Viewsonic]

When you aquire level 70 in EQ, thats not the end. There are areas that just open up to you. A lot of the areas require a LOT of highly equiped players to work together to unlock and open up more areas. Unlike in CoH - You get there and there is nothing.. Nothing to unlock, no carrot to keep you going. EQ *always* has something to do when you reach the "end game" - be it defeating GODS, getting more equipment (there is NEVER an end to this), or raising hundreds of alternate advancement abilities (These give you extra skills - And you can work on some of them until you are level 60/65/70 .. To get them, it might take WEEKS to aquire each skill.. ) .. There is ALWAYS something in EQ at the end.

I would go so far as to say that Everquest BEGINS when you hit level 70, not end. Unlike CoH.

Re:Completely wrong! EQ has an "end game".

[jandrese]

Isn't this what Hamidon is supposed to be? As far as I know the current version of Hamidon has yet to be beaten on any server. You are right though that once you hit level 50 in CoH you're better off rolling an alt (preferably of a different archetype) and starting over.

Re:Completely wrong! EQ has an "end game".

[shumway]

How long has EQ been out now? And how much of that endgame content was there in the first year?

Re:Completely wrong! EQ has an "end game".

[Anonymous Coward]

I joined Everquest after one year, three months. At that point, there was *plenty*. However, to see much of this content you probably had to bring along 40+ good friends of high level (aka a whole guild) to see it. This is not really a great way to limit access to content.

One nice thing about the game runing so long is that we can go back with our now more powerful characters and actully do some of this content without the inertia which such large groups have. Specifically, plane of hate and plane of sky. Plane of fear is still pretty rough to break into with one group (unless you are really, really high end).

As far as I know, Everquest has always had tons of content. Again, partly this was because of the massive numbers and organization needed. Literally one person of those 40 or 50 could screw the whole raid (the whole guild), get everyone killed, and it could take hours to just get back to where you were.

I don't think too many other MMORPGs have this kind of hardcore raiding - even everquest has softened it considerably over time - so I'm not saying this is the way to go. It does promote teamwork and stragegy and it breeds spoiler sites - you want to save all your good friends all that time don't you? However it is very frusturating and there is lots of anger when someone screws up and the lag you get with that many people in one place is pretty bad so people turn off the fancy graphics.

A more general question...

[Gothic_Walrus]

My question is simple, but I think we need at least one question that's not related to the game or to Mr. Emmert directly.

What do you think of the MMOG market as a whole? Over the past few years, we've seen a flood of games released. We've seen sequels to established games - Everquest II, for example. We've seen games based on licenses, such as Star Wars Galaxies. We've seen high-profile titles such as Mythica cancelled. We've seen completely unique ideas, like A Tale in the Desert. Obviously, the market is completely different than it was even a year ago today.

Put simply, what do you think of the market in its current state, and what future do you see for it? Will you be a part of that future? MMy question is simple, but I think we need at least one question that's not related to the game or to Mr. Emmert directly.

What do you think of the MMOG market as a whole? Over the past few years, we've seen a flood of games released. We've seen sequels to established games - Everquest II, for example. We've seen games based on licenses, such as Star Wars Galaxies. We've seen high-profile titles such as Mythica cancelled. We've seen completely unique ideas, like A Tale in the Desert. Obviously, the market is completely different than it was even a year ago today.

Put simply, what do you think of the market in its current state, and what future do you see for it? Will you be a part of that future?

The question might not seem very exciting, but I belive that Mr. Emmert is in a very unique position to answer it...

DEADLANDS WALK'N...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to note, the followup game, City of Villians, is going to be co-produced by Shane Hensley, who is the main developer of Deadlands.

For those not in the know, Deadlands is a 6 year-running Role Playing Game series. It's first game, Deadlands: the Weird West, is set in an alternate history US, where an Indian Shaman opens a door to (basically) hell, and evil spirits flow into the world, causing, amung other things Magicians to use real magic (by playing card games with demons), Indian Shamans to get real power, and causing the US Civil War to go from 4 to 17+ years. It also has two secondary games - Deadlands: Hell on Earth (futuristic post-Apocolypse) and Deadlands: Lost Colony (extra-planitary colonization), as well as a CCG called Doomtown (based on a fictional town in California durring the Weird West). It's a faboulous deep, great story game, and is in the next year (March I believe) due for a relaunch (Deadlands: Reloaded) where a new system will be launched.

If your a type who likes RPGs with some meaty story, and hates hack-n-slash, please take a look.

(and note: If you like PDFs, every book in Deadlands is avaiable as PDF downloads so no need to hunt down out-of-print books!)

RPG "light"

[Hays]

I'm an active COH player and an ex-everquest player. I must first give you kudos for making a really polished, fun game. It's really a great take on the MMORPG.

The game has a bus-load of fun ideas. The badge system is great. The costume system and character creation are amazing. Technically, the game is top notch- great mapmaking, great animation, etc...

One of the best ideas is simplicity. Starting players don't have to worry about complicated inventory systems. They just go out there and start kicking butt. Kicking butt is not to difficult, because the player is quite a bit stronger versus the environment compared to previous MMORPGs.

But that simplicity becomes a drag in the later game. I've got 3 characters approaching the high end (mid 30s) and I'm starting to dislike the slow experience grind, with nothing to look forward to but a new ability every 3 levels.

Missions are fun, but they get a bit formulaic. With one huge exception, they offer uninteresting rewards and have cookie cutter goals. (The exception being the wonderful respec mission)

I'm sure it was a conscious design decision to have no inventory system, no armor, no weapons. And I think that's a great idea, at first. But by the time you're level 30 and you've played the game for a couple of months, you really start to want MORE. The enhancement system doesn't cut it. That's just a trip to the store every 5 levels. I'd like to get a cool piece of (origin specific) armor when I complete a task force.

Even baby steps in this direction would great. A way to distinguish myself (other than aesthetically) from other players would be nice. This could also give origins a chance to actually matter.

So the question in all of this is- why the aversion to traditional RPG elements, even at high levels? Is this going to change?

Re:RPG "light"

[Anonymous Coward]

With all due respect, I wouldn't call mid 30s the "high end". While I agree that there's a fair dry patch between 30 and 40, the really interesting (some might say epic) content starts appearing from 40 onward. It starts with the sewer trial, available at level 38, and continues with the Eden trial, in-depth portal mission story arcs, really serious arch-villains, etc., most of which is centered on players between levels 40 and 50. In Issue 2, they added some "epic"-style content for low-level players (The Hollows and its major mission/story arc, which ends with the Caverns of Transcendence trial). Hopefully, future Issues will add more varied and interesting content for mid-level players.

Re:RPG "light"

[Anonymous Coward]

You can always Sidekick with higher levels see the stuff quicker.

I like the Empl system as well. It gives the high level players a reason to help lower level players.

Been playing the game for 2 months now, and I can't get over how friendly people are. You die in the middle of no where the chances of getting someone to help is easy.

As for the grind. Maybe if they had a system that lets you trade in Influence or Badges for XP.

Re:RPG "light"

[DJerman]

Just a quick point -- origin specific armor is in the game -- it's a single-origin enhancement you get for most of those missions. Before you holler "no! I mean something I can wear!" consider -- if it's in the game everone will have it. There's literally no way to distinguish your character from others in any MMORPG because anyone can copy your build. You can try, by making unpopular choices and with COH's wonderful costume variety, but fundamentally you'll be just as alike with a bit of armor or a weapon as you are now. You can only distinguish yourself by personal expression -- your banter, your play style, whatever. The distinguishing marks have to come between chair and keyboard, anything in the game is just more of the same :). BTW - I agree that most of the content is similar-ish in the abstract, but of all the MMORPG's I've played COH is the one with the most novelty over the shortest time, including gorgeous new maps, new quests, etc. (No, I don't EQ) The story arcs and trials are a little more compelling than the regular missions, but they're becoming a way to accomplish the distinguishing marks you're looking for -- if they add many more you'll have to abandon some of them on your way, and the badges they offer will never be yours. It's still perfectly possible for others to have the same background, but it's one more set of combinations that will tend to make characters differ.

Re:RPG "light"

[Snaller]

But by the time you're level 30 and you've played the game for a couple of months, you really start to want MORE.

Yes MORE missions - MORE exp. Thank you.

nintendo dslinux.com could play this thing!

[Anonymous Coward]

A port of Linux and Mame into the Nintendo DS already in progress!

You are the Main character

[phloydde1]

I played a few MMORPGs and CRPGs and always run into the same problem. The world is static, my actions have limited scripted outcomes or little impact on the world at large. When you read a good book, you follow the exploits of a main character, see the world react to them and them react to the world. When you play pen and paper RPG's you get this same sense. The DM (if he/she is good) makes you feel like you have accomplished something and the world has changed because of what you've done. In MMORPG's you have thousands of main characters running through the same plots. (i.e. quests). The outcome is the same if I do it or if the other 9999 people do it. So my question is, do you think it is possible to get that sense of "changing the world" of good books and RPGs in MMORPGs or are they two totally seperate beasts? Is the main goal of MMORPGs always going to be "Gotta kill the XXX boss so I can get the magic XXX so I can...uhhh....brag?" _phloydde

Breaking into vid. game industry

[crazyfreakid]

How did you end up in the video game industry, and what experiences in high-school and college helped that move? and/or What path would you recommend for someone interested in getting into the video game industry?

Maximizing time

[Lord_Dweomer]

One of the pitfalls of every MMORPG I can think of is maximizing time in order to advance. Every action to advance your character requires you to think of the most efficient way of doing things.

This does not sound very fun, and aside from social aspects, what gameplay features do you plan on implementing to make sure CoH strays away from this rut that every MMORPG has thusfar fallen into?

Trick or Treating

[pagen]

I really enjoyed the Trick or Treating Halloween Weekend. When and how did the idea come about? Was this something that was planned from the start of the game or was it an after thought?

Re:MMO's and Death Penalties - whats the infatuati

[fair_n_hite_451]

I'm guessing at least part of the infatuation is that player's want it.

I play a fair amount of Diablo2 these days, and while not a MMO in the classic sense, it shares many of the traits.

In it, you have the choice of playing "hardcore" (die and you're gone period) or "softcore" (die and you lose xps & cash, all your items are with your body and need to be recovered, etc).

LOTS of players, myself included, choose to play hardcore. It's the extra rush of knowing the death is indeed permanent.

I would think that CoH and any other MMO would do well to cater to both mindsets.

World of Warcraft

[SilentChris]

World of Warcraft has a huge base of Blizzard fans and the company is generally one of the best in the business. Is the City of Heroes team (and other developers) scared of it?

Great Gameplay but Runs Poorly

[WebMasterP]

One of the things my friends and I comment on most about the game is that it is fun. However, we almost always follow that up with a comment how poorly the game runs. Even on high-end video cards (my roommate's Radeon 9800 and my GeForce 6800) with better than average CPU and RAM the game runs so choppy and slow. It seems to be that if you don't turn your particle counts down to nothing, it's visually annoying. Also, visual sluggishness seems to be directly affected by ping and since all the servers we can choose from seem to be on the East Coast or something, we ping ~200ms (190 in good times).

It's kind of aggitating to me because I've played WoW in early beta and it felt like a finished game compared to CoH (at least game-engine wise).

I'm not trying to flame or anything, I'm being honest. Why aren't there servers on the west coast, and if there are, why aren't we shown server pings so we can pick which one we want?

Re:Great Gameplay but Runs Poorly

[Justus]

In my opinion, the City of Heroes engine actually seemed to work pretty well, from a performance perspective. My Athlon64 3000 and Radeon 9800 Pro give me acceptable framerates without slowdowns, but that's with two things: world detail and character detail at 100% (definite slowdown at 200%) and no AA/AF. Your mileage may vary if you prefer higher quality settings (oh, I run it at 1280x1024 before that comes up), but it seems to run appreciably better than, say, FFXI on my machine.

However, I totally hear you on complaints about the netcode. If you incur any packet loss (it's not uncommon for my university connection to hit 3-5% loss, which doesn't disturb Quake 3, FFXI, or Guild Wars very much) the game tends to have serious issues handling it; many times, it will just crash repeatedly rather than lose connection. You can get an ingame ping to the servers with the netgraph (/net_graph 1) but I'm pretty sure they're all on the east coast. I'm in the Midwest and I ping 130-150 on average.

WoW's engine had some key design decisions that grant it pretty good performance all over (the cartoonish style, which I personally dislike, allows them to lower polygon counts a bit), and I do agree that it's probably better coded.

Oh well, City of Heroes is decent fun when it's getting along with my connection.

Re:Great Gameplay but Runs Poorly

[snuf23]

That's odd. While I do have to drop my particle count a little to prevent jerkiness when fighting with a large group (plenty of powers/buffs going off) I haven't had a major problem like you are describing.
On my older P4 2.4GHz with 5600 Ultra it ran fine in 1024x768. On my upgraded p4 3.2GHz with 6800GT it runs great at 1280x1024 with 4x aa 4x aniso.
I agree with your comment about showing server pings and locations though. I think there are west coast servers, at least some people in game were surprised to see me (Hawaii player) playing on Pinnacle which is East coast.
Since my gaming experience isn't bad I haven't bothered investigating.
You might want to make sure you dont have other weird net traffic going on. I have found spyware infestations can cause all kinds of problems with general network speed and QOS.

Re:Great Gameplay but Runs Poorly

[ACPosterChild]

As another data point: I have a Thunderbird 1GHz, GeForce 2MX 400, 512MB, and a DSL line with a good ping AFAIK. Sure, I turn down sprites, etc., but my framerate only ever slows down when I'm in a large group (6-8) with a lot of people doing AoE.

Character Designer

[Kentamanos]

CoH probably has the most flexible system for designing the visual appearance of a character of all the MMORPG's I've played or tried (beta/free trial, etc.). The Star Wars Galaxies character designer is maybe a little more flexible in certain areas (face, age, and weight), but I think CoH's offers more variety. It usually takes an hour just to play around with how your character will look.
Due to its flexibility, it's not too hard to make characters that look very close to copyrighted comic book characters etc.

How big of a struggle was the content creation process for costume items. For instance, were certain masks rejected by your legal department because they looked too much like Batman's or perhaps Cyclops' visor. Also, has anyone actually calculated the number of combinations of all 5 archetypes and origins?

Re:Character Designer

[crashfrog]

Also, has anyone actually calculated the number of combinations of all 5 archetypes and origins?

5*5 = 25 combinations of archetypes and origins.

If you meant "how many different ways can I make a first level character?", let's figure it out from the manual:

((5*5 Blaster combinations) + (6*5 Controller combinations) + (6*5 Defender combinations) + (6*4 Scrapper combinations) + (4*7 Tanker combinations)) * 5 Origins * 2 First-level power alternatives = 1370 different characters at first level.

That's a fair amount, but it's not really what I would consider open-ended. But it gets better as you go along; as characters advance, the differences between them get greater. As compared to a game like The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, where characters start off different but all approach an identical character build (maxed out in every ability and skill) with advancement.

The costume system is great, isn't it? I'm afraid I'm soured on other games now. Just did the Guild Wars preview; I was all like "what is this? I only get to pick my hairstyle? Lame..." I hope extremely detailed character design makes its way into other games. Who would have guessed that grown men would have such fun dressing up dolls?

Re:Character Designer

[Kentamanos]

I meant how many combinations of outfits for all the character types :). The number has to be very large (just think about how many colors you can chose for EACH piece and how many symbols you can pick for your chest).

Granted, there's a slider for "muscularity", but other than that, the rest of the choices are discrete numbers. Many of the allowed costume choices depend on your origin though.

There are a lot of challenges to designing a 3D engine with a LOT of customization. Everyone has to be able to dynamically load geometry and textures based upon who is around them. When everyone looks the same, it's easier on resources (even if they only have different colors or textures).

Re:Character Designer

[crashfrog]

Many of the allowed costume choices depend on your origin though.

Uh, are you sure about that? I've never seen that to be the case, and I must have generated 100 characters or so, just to mess around with the costuming. The choice of Origin has never, in my experience, had any effect on what costume choices I can make.

Re:Character Designer

[Kentamanos]

It definitely makes a difference. For instance, Magic origin has access to hoods that others don't.

Re:Character Designer

[crashfrog]

For instance, Magic origin has access to hoods that others don't.

Uh, no, it doesn't.

There's only two hoods you can take when you design your first-level costume; they don't change when you change your origin.

I know, because I just checked.

Re:Character Designer

[Kentamanos]

You're right, I just checked (took me a while to patch up...been a while).

Re:Character Designer

[crashfrog]

Yeah, same here, which is why I thought maybe you were talking about something in a new patch.

It would have been cool, though. As it is it seems like Origin decides which stores you shop at and who you get to talk to, and that's about it. Unique costume options or power animations would have been a nice touch, but maybe that's expecting too much.

Re:Character Designer

[Kentamanos]

I guess it just seems to me that people of the magic origin for instance shouldn't be able to have robotic arms etc. :)

I really thought some of that stuff was in there, but apparently not.

Re:Character Designer

[crashfrog]

Oh, I hear you on that. As much fun as it is to play superhero dress-up with the game, it's obvious that the vast majority of players have absolutely no idea how to make a great looking character, or how to tie a costume into a character concept.

I too want to punch the bejeezus out of things

[Valegor]

There has been an overwhelming call on the City of Heroes forums for the Superstrength Powerset to be added to scrappers or for a new powerset to be created that would allow similar looking attacks. Has this been considered by the developers or are there any other plans in the work to grant the overwhelming request to "punch the bejeezus out of things"?

I realize that there are balance concerns, but most of the posters are simply asking for a non-skilled punch based powerset. Essentially it is a visual issue more than anything else that is preventing players from playing the type of character that they truely want to.

Re:I too want to punch the bejeezus out of things

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. A whole new archetype with various powersets would be even better. Powersets like an all-punching one, another one with punches, handclaps, footstomps, etc.

Submitting as AC because the GDSOB account creation system won't let me.

Re:I too want to punch the bejeezus out of things

[Anonymous Coward]

Sign me up... I want powers like:
Make into Crater
Throw Villian through Building
Punch into Orbit
Swat with Bus
I'll gladly suffer any restriction you can imagine, just so long as I get to punch the bejeezus out of things.

Halloween was a riot

[The Infidel]

The trick or treat 'party' was an amazingly fun break from the usual mission stuff. I actually felt like I was trick-or-treating! Do you have any plans for Christmas?

A question about enhancements...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was wondering what your thoughts are on the current state of the enhancement model for power upgrading and customization.

Quick version of comment and question: As a longtime player it seems that enhancements turn from a rewarding and fun aspect of the game into a tedious chore as you progress. Do you consider the current implementation of enhancements an unmitigated success? And do you think the system will go forward unmodified from its current implementation?

Long version: I see enhancements as a mixed bag. On the positive side the system allows one of the great advantages that your game has, a relatively easy way to implement a sidekicking system. Another great benefit is how flexible character choices are for how their own powers work. On the negative side however enhancements just seem to become more and more tedious as the levels go up. In more traditional mmorpgs and their equipment model you seldom needed to worry about details of any particular item, if you got the Super Awesome Sword of Slaying, you just equiped it and were done with any choices till you came across another item. With enhancements, and the large number of enhancement slots, enhancement management gets to be more and more tedious as you progress in the game. Especially considering the "aging" model that enhancements age out of usefulness every few levels.

My issues with enhancements and their consequences on characters in no particular order:
- Aging of enhancements lead to a weird "roller coaster" effect on character power. Every chance you get to upgrade enhancements (every 5 levels) your character gets a considerable power boost, and then declines until the next chance to fully upgrade.
- Trading enhancements with players just doesn't work at higher levels. (and is questionable at lower levels unless you can get SO's(read level limited more powerful upgrades) early.) Yes, you can buy enhancements on the market, however at the higher levels when many powers need to be working their best buying over 50 enhancements is a rather unrealistic way to play, it just isn't worth the time or effort to spend 5 minutes negotiating a sale when influence(money) is almost worthless, and you are only able to buy an upgrade for 1/6th of one of your many powers by doing so.
- Enhancements as a system of reward is broken because of the relative value one single enhancement has on your character. At higher levels I essentially NEVER get excited about an enhancement drop. Lets face it, enhancements are the only system of Loot in the game, and the same 1/6th of just one of your powers problem is here too. When I have 18+ powers and I can upgrade 1/6th of one of those, it is barely a measurable change in my characters power.
- Because of the lack of excitement of enhancement rewards the boon you get on completion of high end task forces in the game is incredibly anti-climactic. "I just saved the world and all I got was this lousy enhancement."

As a result of these issues and others enhancements just become a tedium as the game progresses. (managing, selling, upgrading and trading all become work rather than anything that contributes to the fun of playing.)

Some of these issues could be addressed easily. (The rollercoaster effect could be elminated by allowing purchase of all lvls of enhancements from stores for example.) However the lack of a viable (imo) loot system is a serious detraction from the game. Perhaps a global power upgrade system that could be awarded on story arcs and task forces would be a possible solution, say an item or even a secondary system of enhancement slots that upgraded one aspect of all powers a (possibly very) minor amount.

Finally the question, how do you think the current system of enhancements is working, and are there any changes you think might be made to make this aspect of the game more exciting/rewarding for players?

Rewards

[kirakane]

Being one of those people who now have multiple 50th level characters. I have to assume there's going to be a new rewards system for repeating, experiencing content and continuing to play the same character. What are some ideas that are being bantered about Cryptic at this point?

And what's planned for better mission interactivity?

We're aware there are skills (the out of combat system) and Kheledians in the future. But neither of those directly impact how experienced characters fight the good fight and continue do things to entertain themselves. We're well into the realm of been there, done that, don't want to do it again. And it's tremendously poor that you can run out of missions to do.

What's out there to entice veteran players to play their favorite high level main chararcter?

PS: It'd be really nice to have the opportunity for player submitted content. Which would be a really ground breaking for MMO's in general.

Future Games in the Hole

[Gnpatton]

I would like to ask generic questions about Cryptic's future releases plans. Does cryptic have any future game plans other than CoH? As well, will they be strictly MMO's or single players as well?

NCSoft and Cryptic - relationship?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know NCSoft is a Korean game software developer (in fact, it's one of the biggest in Korea, with tons of people competing to get into the firm every year). What is/was their role? Do they supply the networking expertise, while Cryptic designed and developed the game and its engine? Or was there a mixed team of developers from both companies working on the whole thing from start to finish?

Multihead support

[evil9000]

Will the game ever have advanced features such as multi monitor display? Multi-CPU/HT support?

Live Events

[brandonY]

On the last day of the beta test, there was a famous invasion of Paragon City. Now, in the live game, there have been a few events like Trick or Treat, but there hasn't been any real attack or invasion approaching the Rikti invasion in size. Does having a number of worlds instead of a single one make things like this harder to implement? Is it hard to create events that players of all levels can participate in? Will we see more major events in the coming months?

Wow, a city designer

[aclarke]

I have a couple questions:

1. With so many heroes possessing herculean strength (hence the term "herculean", of course), are there special structural considerations you have to make when designing buildings? I mean, it only takes a few pissed-off Samson types pulling over columns before your "City of Heroes" is more like a "Ruin of Heroes". I realize this may be more a question for the "City of Heroes Chief Engineer" but hey, you're the one answering the questions...

2. Also, do you have the city apportioned off according to ability, cloak colour, age, or what? How do you deal with disagreements between various heroic neighbours? For instance, my cousin Freddy's a hero who lives in the older planned hero community of Superville. His neighbour two doors down is the only one on the block who can fly, and he's always zooming in drunk in the middle of the night, making a racket and showing off. He'd like to move to a neighbourhood where the flying heroes live somewhere else. Just an example.

Eagerly awaiting your responses,
- Andrew.

Re:Wow, a city designer

[Maserati]

I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Wow, a city designer

[nycbrujah]

I had a contact in Skyway once that was on some urban devlopement council or something like that. I love reading the Ask About This Contact Screens. Anyway, she made a comment in there about how the city code ordinaces had to be changed so that buildings could withstand a flying hero getting smashed into them. I wish I could remember her name, but she's at the top of the zone. I found it rather cool and interesting that they thought of this kind of stuff for a contact.

PvP Healing in CoH

[Elsebet]

Thank you for an enjoyable game. I only levelled to 34 before it became less enjoyable and more a grind. However I do have to commend you on the Defender class and more specifically the Empathy line. It was the first healer in an MMORPG that I've played (and yes I've played almost all of them) where sacrifice was an important aspect of the class.

For those of you who haven't played, the Defender's Empathy power set was the most robust when it came to heals. However the Empathy Defender had only 1 way to directly heal themselves, with the least powerful group heal. Sure they could use the health regeneration boost as well, but it is more a small HoT (heal over time). The Empathy Defender's biggest heal (Absorb Pain) actually hurts the Defender and makes them unable to heal for 30 seconds or so.

This same concept is shown now in Guild Wars, where the Monk cannot heal his or herself except through their mitigation buffs and one group heal. The monk's group heal also heals enemies which requires an even higher level of proficiency to use in PvP.

My question then, was this a direct way to balance and challenge the top healer class for PvP? I've seen PvP Healing to be a debate in other games (Anarchy Online and EQ especially) and this seemed an interesting way to deal with it and not harm the PvE component too much. I'm eager to see how CoV shapes up for the Empathy Defenders/Controllers.

Genre Innovation

[sprayNwipe]

As a long time game designer, why did you choose to go through the cliched "Skills and Levels in an RPG" route for COH, when there is such a huge gaping hole for MMO games that don't have their core game mechanics rooted in old-school tabletop mechanics?

Guild Wars

[Gaijin_Judoka]

I played the open beta of your NCSoft family member Guild Wars this weekend and was very impressed. What effect will Guild Wars have on the MMORPG industry if it succeeds at providing a high quality MMORPG experience without the monthly subscription? What effect might this have on CoH in particular?

Re:Any Plans to Adapt the COH Engine to Other Genr

[AvantLegion]

>> Do you have any plans for development of another MMORPG - possibly Fantasy or SF based - using the City of Heroes game engine?

Because if there's one style setting that's totally under-represented in online RPGs, it's fantasy!

Hmmm

[PyrochMaster]

What have you learned about what players want from MMORPG's from the creation and operation of CoH, and will you apply what you've learned in future expansions? Or will that be saved for another MMORPG to be stuffed into an already crowded enviroment?

Two Questions

[Sage Gaspar]

1) City of Heroes is the only major MMORPG, to my knowledge, that puts out expansive updates on a regular basis that add tremendous content into the game. EQ, for example, releases a bunch of small changes bundled together in expansion packs (some of which have been less "expansive" than the free content updates), and SWG has been playing catch-up with content promised at the beginning. What enables CoH to pump out large updates relatively bug-free using only the subscription fee, while other MMORPGs charge an extra fee by releasing them as expansion packs? 2) I just completed the Cavern of Transcendence trial and found it to be one of the most fulfilling gaming experiences in recent history. Even though we failed due to the time limit, the change of pace of getting players organized into the right positions on a time deadline was really neat. What made it even better was that due to the less "hardcore" nature of the CoH fanbase, none of us had any idea what was coming up on the way in. Do you have plans to add more Trials such as these (for example, the Dam defense trial that was hinted at previously)?

Native port

[Anonymous Coward]

That's well and good (and thanks for the information), but I think he was asking for a native version -- which I'd like and pay money for, as well.

Besides, what about all those other games out there that Wine can't handle? Maybe I'm straying from the topic, here, but the more games get coded for Linux, the more games will get coded for Linux. Hell, if I was a graphics programmer, I'd be out there coding games right now.

Will MMORPG ever leave the "skinner box" model?

[gad_zuki!]

All MUD-based games are simple skinner boxes in which we are expected to perform repetitive tasks (killing mobs, missions) to get rewards (levels, powers). I played COH for a couple months and appreciated how your team shifted away from the standard MUD model by incorporating missions and large group missions as opposed to relying on just killing mobs which pop-up. Still, its just a variation on the skinner box and there is a lot of MUD-like killing.

Ironically, there is no incentive to "act like a hero" in City of Heroes. Everyone has their role to play, be it tank, healer, hitter, etc. Its very formal and deterministic. Trying to be Spiderman or Superman will get you killed quickly. Can you break this formula and deliver a game in which taking chances produces results? Can you envision a level-less character system? That is to say a game where your cunning, skill, intelligence, patience, tactics etc determine your strength not your level or armor rating? A game where a gunshot kills any level character and only the better players survive regardless if the character is 2 minutes or 2,000 hours old?

Re:Will MMORPG ever leave the "skinner box" model?

[Bugmaster]

I like what you're saying, but let me just play Devil's Advocate for a moment.

CoH is a game about superheroes. Superheroes (at least, traditional ones) do not generally take chances or rely on "patience, tactics, etc.". This may sound ridiculous, but think about it for a moment. Superman is impervious to all damage (except for Kryptonite); it's impossible to hurt him. He can also fly and throw cars around (after grilling them a bit with his heat-vision). Spiderman's Spidey Sense warns him of imminent danger, and his super-reflexes allow him to cocoon the enemies before they can even think of taking a swing at him. Storm can rain city-wide lightning from the skies. Even Batman has no trouble with most evildoers he comes across: he just hangs them from a roof and keeps going.

Comic-books superheroes can be hurt, but it takes a supervillain to do it. Lex Luthor has his cryptonite, Doc Oc has techno-tentacles, etc. CoH is the same way: regular thugs are pretty much there for you to fry, but Dr. Vahzilok or the Clockwork King are trouble. Storm wouldn't assault Magneto's asteroid fortress (or whatever he has now) without getting support from Professor X and the other X-men; and your character wouldn't come after Dr. Vahz without putting together a strong team. It may not be uber-heroic, but that's the way comics work.

Furthermore, there already exists a game where "a gunshot kills any level character and only the better players survive"; it's called Counterstrike. You'll have to admit, though, that the gameplay there is very different from CoH. Not better, not worse, just totally different. Sure, you could make CoH just like CS, but then it would be a different game.

Re:Will MMORPG ever leave the "skinner box" model?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not likely. The fun of MMORPGs relies on the "turn based" nature of the combat and problem solving. Yah, they appear to work in real-time but your performance is mediated by your RPG character. With this mediation you're able to exceed your physical (reflex) prowess and to a degree your own tactical ability. That's what makes them mass-appealing. If you push too much of the formula for success to the customer's actual attributes, you produce a game at which, pretty much by definiton, most people will suck. People don't like to play games that give them consistently negative feedback. The game will go down the tubes if it permits elites to exist that can compete directly with the non-elite. Now in CS and Battlefield and others this works, but they're free-play games and the elite tend to get clannish and exclude those that would be abused. In MMORPG such exclusion and small-group action is mostly not possible (though instanced missions produce some of this effect). Sure, the top 2% will compete -- thus the popularity of CounterStrike. But most of us schlubs can't play CS competitively, and won't pay monthly for the privilege of getting shot by our neighbors. The only reason CS works so well is it's free to play once you buy in (and once you buy in it's too late). Let's face it, the MUD game is meant to be a time-waster. An idle fantasy where we can succeed, on average. COH is fantastically successful in reinforcing this feeling of success, which is what makes it so popular, if a little light-weight. And for those that are bothered by the grind -- get up and enjoy the big room with the bright blue ceiling. Come back to COH when you want to enjoy today's play instead of tomorrow's goal. It's only points, so relax. Drop your sub if you want, you can always sign up again in 6 months. (although if you're only gone for 3 months you have no net savings from dropping sub)

Shared World

[miyako]

not sure if this will get modded up, I'm posting a little late, but anyway...
One idea that has always been interesting to me is a shared world between many online type of games, COV seems to be the first game to do something like this, with two stand alone clients connecting to the same world. Star Wars Galaxies tried to do something similar by allowing many different play styles. My question is this: With many different types of popular online games (first person shooters, RTS, RPGs, as well as more social type games like A Tale in the Desert and The Sims Online), what do you think of the idea of having a single shared world in which multiple types of games take place.

I noticed a FreeBSD daemon in the game

[snuf23]

I happened to notice that if you zoom in very close to the textures on one of the magazines sitting on a table in mission - the cover features the BSD daemon! This got me to wondering - do you use FreeBSD on any of your servers? What platforms are you running on and what kinds of challenges has the scale of an MMORPG presented to that system?

Re:I noticed a FreeBSD daemon in the game

[Anonymous Coward]

In a similar situation, I believe there was a RedHat magazine or some such.

Players becoming famous

[Anonymous Coward]

I think one way to keep people playing is to really work with the concept of superheroes/groups becoming well-known among the other players. I would love to see statues, plaques, etc. dedicated to amazing acts of bravery, chivalry, self-sacrifice, and so on.

I also think it would be interesting to have an in-game museum where players can go look at screenshots of famous battles, scenes, and whatnot.

Finally, I think characters that have hit the endgame stage should have an option to keep playing that person or become an NPC "contact" (person who gives missions to players) permanently in-game.

Frankly, part of being a superhero is about gaining notoriety--I would love to see outstanding players recognized and immortalized.

Costs too much

[Qrlx]

I realize as the designer this isn't really your thing, but...

180,000 players x 15 bucks a month = 2.7 million dollars per month. That's over 30 million dollars a year. Add in another few million for (probably more than) 180,000 initial purchases of the game. Now, surely, I want you and your team to be rich, and no doubt there's a lot of bandwidth to pay for. But still, it seems a tad expensive.

Couldn't these games cost, say, five dollars a month? The (exorbitant?) recurring monthly fee has been the single biggest thing keeping me away from MMPs.

I should point out that I'm the sort of person who will donate to keep my favorite servers online, but I realize that model might not work on the scale we're talking about.

Convince me you're not gouging me and maybe I'll give City of Heroes a go.

Re:Costs too much

[zokrath]

I am going to throw some theoretical numbers at you, because I doubt he is going to give you any real numbers to contradict the ones that I am about to retrieve from that infinite repository of questionable facts that is my arse.

Let us assume that fifty people are paid directly by this game; this includes live content creators, the design team, 24 hour IT guys, and management at the companies involved. It does not include the full team that created the boxed product, or the Game Masters, or tech support.

If we take half of that monthly fee then that is an average of 27,000 a year, and we are left with 1.35 million.

The hourly customer service and GM support, being paid ten dollars an hour with an average of thirty people working twenty-four-seven ( A measly 1 to 834 ratio of customer to service assuming 25,000 as a peak average), which is another 216,000 a month. Multiply that if you want better ratios.

Assuming a consistent output of 5kB per player per second, and an average cieling of 25,000 players online at once, that is 128,125,000 bits per second, which is about 85% of an OC-3 pipe, which can cost 35-60 thousand a month, simply for their base bandwidth. They will need extra for patches, and will need reserve bandwidth on tap in case the load gets heavier than normal.

There is also several million dollars of server hardware, which needs to be maintaned, updated, upgraded, and expanded over its lifetime.

Massive games also have longer development time, with more people working on the project during that time, but the box costs the standard price of a stand alone game, which means the publisher needs to recoup the costs of paying for all of those extra salaries and that extra cooking time.

No doubt a fair bit of the monthly fee is pure profit, which is why you see so many massive games being released. But the entire development team is not running around with giant sacks of the playerss cash and laughing manically. Well, they might be, but eventually they will use that money to pay for the upkeep of the game.

The problem with ATITD...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that ultimately much of the game's tasks ended up being tedious and repetitive, especially when it came high-time for a community-wide advancement project.

The game itself practically encouraged macroing in its design, as to really do anything you often had to click whichever crafting device you were working on at least 3 times, then go to the next device, click some more, etc. Hello poor ergonomics! Hello carpal tunnel!

In essence the game's concept is interesting, but its execution is ass-end ugly and inelegant. The only saving grace of the game appears to be its community, who are all willing to pay $15/mo for the priveledge of playing together, regardless of how poor the game is.

However, I'm downright inspired by the fact that this game this low-budget can exist and be somewhat finacially successful, even though the users get the shaft at almost every turn. That's impressive.

Re:When will City of Villans be rolled up with CoH

[arthurh3535]

City of Villains is a "related" game that you can play seperately or at the same time. They are actually trying to swing a deal so that you only have to pay one subscription price.

the future?

[Random_Goblin]

where do you see the future of gaming going?

With the amount of money required to produce games, and the increasing levels of expectation on the part of the consumer, do you see the distinction,(and independance) between say the film industry and the immersive games industry blurring further, or do you see them as intrinsically separate art forms?

Game Systems

[gim_alelen]

I must first off compliment Mr. Emmert and the other developers of City of Heroes for crafting an outstanding and overall FUN game. What is the creation process the team goes through to come up with the in-game events? Having not been in the beta and too busy to take part in the Rularuu invasion, I spent much of Halloween "trick or treating" with my friends and beating up werewolves and the like. It was the most fun I've had in a game, ever, and earned my everlasting loyalty to this game. This is one player who will not be jumping ship for World of Warcraft. Do you have a team of writers who come up with the concepts, and then on to storyboarding and coding? Are there any plans for more scripted, involved events in the future? Do you plan to keep up with the updates as well? Your customer support staff is fabulously responsive, and the updates are fantastic. Any details on the upcoming DVD version? I understand there might be some "perks" for those who purchase it?... Thanks again.

Few questions

[Anonymous Coward]

In another popular mmorpg, Dark Age of Camelot, you won't see many active healers anymore. over 85% of the healer classes are actually buff bots on 2nd player accounts used to give each player 'god mode' status out in the rvr areas. While Mythic Entertainment no doubt loves this(they can artificially inflate the user count while making twice as much cash), it is ruining the game on so many levels(try beating someone with a bot. And try finding a group now that everyone just solos while power levelling their bots). Does your game suffer this same issue? If not, where can I sign up?

Re:Few questions

[matoh]

To be an effective healer in CoH you have to:
A) Alternate between several different heal powers.
B) Apply those heals at the right time.
C) Apply other buffs besides heals.

No easy task for a bot.

Death

[Databass]

Let X represent the percentage of your life lived. So level 100 is your death.

"Alas," you exclaim, upon reaching the end of your life "I have reached level 100, and there was nothing more! My whole life was for naught!"

Can't the journey of the game be meaningful in and of itself? I grant that the endgame can be important in keeping players in the long term, but to make it seem like players were robbed and the entire experience up to level cap was meaningless without some kind of endgame seems a bit extreme.

Re:When will City of Villans be rolled up with CoH

[Anonymous Coward]

They are actually trying to swing a deal so that you only have to pay one subscription price.

Tee hee.

Hey Biff, can we set this up so our players can pay one price to play our two games? No? Oh well... we'll have to charge you twice, darnit.

another reason

[notcreative]

that, and the vast anti-mac conspiracy where publishers will actually REFUSE money from customers who own apple computers.

My question

[truffle]

Why didn't you guys hire me when I sent you my resume :'(

P.S. I'm flying out to one of your competitors next week for an interview :P

I have a question...

[Anonymous Coward]

aren't you the guy who used to work at the KFC near the subway? yeah.. so how's it going? a game designer? so do you think you can get your old job at KFC back?

Going from one medium to the other

[planeswalker]

As someone who follows the game industry (because I have hopes of joining it one day) I have a question that has peaked my interest for some time now. What is it like to go from working the pen and paper medium to going to the electronic one, espescially in the MMoG field? What kind of design differences have you noticed, and which one do you favor, and why?

Re:Any Plans to Adapt the COH Engine to Other Genr

[Maserati]

While you're waiting for his next game with the CoH engine, check out EVE Online. Four starting factions (not actively at war last I heard) and dozens of large player organizations make for very strong raiding and "realm" competition. EVE also has a lot of PvP. Core areas are patrolled by tough NPC ships, rim regions are patrolled by even tougher PC ships. On the downside, the game is very, very hard solo. If you don't have backup, you're dead in over half the map.

Action-Oriented MMORPG's

[Erik Hollensbe]

Hi Jack,

One of the things that originally attracted me to CoH was the more action-geared combat. As I'm sure you know, a good deal of games in your selected genre involve basically initiating an attack, and pressing a key at an interval or not at all. Magic is "fun" by letting you do different attacks instead of just one.

My point is, you guys have carved a niche that is not so much action it's a FPS (Planetside), but has not made combat so dull it could all be done on pen and paper with relative ease (FFXI, EQ, etc). CoH does a great job mixing things like proper positioning with powers and great teamplay.

Where do you see this going in the future? If I may be so coy to coin your game as a "Massively Multiplayer Platformer", do you agree with this assertion, and (heh) without violating any contracts, do you think it has room to allow for expansive gameplay beyond what CoH offers?

Getting into the industry.

[ontheheap]

What advice, other than studying mathematics and programming, do you have for an undergrad wanting to get into the game industry as a programmer?

CoH utilizes OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

DirectSound and DirectInput. Uninformed people STFU

Fifth column

[testadicazzo]

There are persistent rumors that you will be eliminating the fifth column before your european release. Any truth to this?

Raids (or the lack of thereof)

[Walkiry]

Don't get me wrong, I see no appeal whatsoever in this kind of stuff, but as of today the only high level "Raid" content of the game is Hamidon. Are there plans to add more raids like this to the game, or (hopefully) add some different kind of massively cooperative content for the high level characters to munch on?

comics instead of just text

[testadicazzo]

So, this is more of a suggestion than a question. At the beginning and end of missions you give a little text blurb saying what we have to do or have accomplished. I'd dig it heavily if you guys could put these text blurbs into comic form-- it could even be done with miniaturezed screenshots with text bubbles sort of thing.

Maybe not for every mission, but for story arcs and task forces... If you let us save them that would be a lot bigger incentive for me than badges. If you do the screenshots idea, or use images generated from our characters, this would also provide us with a a cool memento of who we were with when we did said task...

Too onerous, or a good idea?

Re:comics instead of just text

[GrayCalx]

Fantastic idea, someone mod this man up.

Re:comics instead of just text

[destroy_all_monsters]

Indeed. :)

How will CoH implement PvP?

[GizmoRevenj]

I played CoH for a few months and enjoyed it quite a bit.
In CoH, PvE is designed such that a player (or a group) can engage mobs several times their number. A Scrapper can solo 2-3 mobs at a time, a group with a Controller can "crowd control" atleast 10 enemies at a time, a Blaster can AoE the beejeezus out of large group of mobs, etc.
So far so good. However, I simply CANNOT think of anyway where these same mechanics could be used again for balanced PvP. The only forseeable way you could do this would be to implement a seperate ruleset for PvE and PvP. In other words, each Hero (more specifically, Hero skills) would behave differently in PvP and PvE. Introducing PvP (in the new City of Villians) expansion will be like opening the pandora's box. Can you she some light as to how you will tackle this issue?

More Character Options?

[matoh]

It was the character configuration screen that got me hooked on CoH when some of my friends demoed it for med. I love dreaming up new alternate characters (alt-o-holic!) and visit the in-game tailor at least every other day. (Gives a nice relief from the level grind and a good way to spend all that excess influence :-) )

So, is there any new configuration options on the (near) horizon for players like me, who like to tinker with our characters look-and-feel? Clothes, accessories, power colors, auras, super-group mode options, individual costume slot body-types/sizes for Jeckyll-and-Hyde-ing, etc?

When are you going to let me give you money?

[Rogerborg]

Asks this European gamer, who still can't purchase City of Heroes. No, I'm not going to buy an import. That just further skews the perception of how important regional markets are.

Limited Users in WinXP and Games That Need Admin

[gfecyk]

2004 saw the release of many popular games that required the user to use Windows XP or Windows 2000 as an administrator user. The reasons for this vary wildly from "bad design" (laziness, lack of testing) to "bad design" (copy protection) to "bad design" (anti-cheat software) and "bad design" (everything in between). We're talking as recent as The Sims 2 released only this year, or Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy.

I'm a professional security consultant and my clients (including home clients) use their computers as limited users to protect against spyware and viruses before the fact. It pains me to explain to a client that they can't play the latest games they want to play without turning off all of the safety features their operating system provides for free. And it isn't hard to design for security either; I modified Quake II in two weeks off-and-on to work.

After four years of Windows 2000 and two years of Windows XP, why are we not seeing games that support the safety features included in these modern operating systems? Does City of Heroes even work properly with them turned on?

Real-life timer, EVE Online-style?

[YamadaJiro]

In EVE Online, death debt was similar to CoH, only it had a real-life timer attached. So if you died, you could either work off the debt the usual way or wait X hours for it to go away, online OR OFFLINE.

I've become a seriously casual player of CoH these days, and I'd find such a system nice for making sure I don't spend a week paying for an error. I'm just wondering whether such "real-time debt" systems have been considered for CoH.

Player Created Content and other issues

[slaker]

I enjoy City of Heroes. It scratches an itch I've had practically since the moment I sat down in front of a computer.
My friends and I dinged level 50 not too long ago. Unlike most of the other posters who claim to have high-level characters or who have spent a lot of time in the game, we still play, at level 50 and with lower-level toons. There's tons stuff to do at high levels - there are at least a half-dozen story arcs or mission sequences that open up above level 45. As for content, well, a lot of it comes from the Clues that many players don't bother to read. Too bad for them. There's some great stories being told.

---
Anyway, the thing I *really* want, perhaps more than anything else, is to flex my own imagination in the World created by City of Heroes. COH has (or had) a mod community for a few weeks until the developers cracked down on it, which is really too bad, because one of the things that is obvious to me, as a player, is that it takes a lot of effort to come up with new stories, new art and new models for the game. Many FPS gamers know the joy of making something completely unique within the realm of their favorite game. COH has glimmerings of possibility as well (here I think of the "skating rinks" in the Frostfire mission), but it seems like the devs are so completely overwhelmed that a lot of those things will never get beyond that glimmer.

So... knowing that there is a modding spirit somewhere in the player-base, and there are a LOT of creative people playing CoH, are there any plans to have some player-created content recognized and officially made part of the game?

--

Second question: How do you justify the present role of tankers within City of Heroes? You've got guys who... take damage. Unlike the invulnerable badasses of comics, these guys really lack any real ability to hit back and REALLY seem more like a traditional MMO archetype than anything Stan Lee might've come up with.

On a related note, what do you say to people who deride certain power sets within the game as not being "super enough", e.g. Super Strength, Psychic Blast, Ice Armor?
--

Why don't the interiors of office buildings in Paragon City have windows?

--

Last question: My single frustration with CoH is that it feels like nothing players do has any ultimate impact on the state of things on my server. I'd love to fail a mission and find, as a consequence, that Bylde Square was turned into a smouldering radioactive pit, or find that my level 50 could permanently evict Clockwork from Skyway City. Do the actions of any player or group of players have an impact in the goings-on of their server? Will this ever be a possibility?

Launch Quality

[ThomasBHardy]

The launch of City of Heroes was joy to behold. Smooth. Few if any disruptions of services. No lag-fests. In this modern day and age of "Release it today, finish it next week", how did you manage to keep focus and bring about such an excellent roll-out? Was it challanging to stay the course? Also, kudos on the marketing channel oriented prestiege power effects. Goes to show how far your imagination can go with otherwise mundane aspects of a game.

Gold based MMO game a possibility?

[greyfeld]

As an ex-Everquest junkie, I can appreciate all of your hard work and the intense devotion of your subscribers. What I am really interested in, however, are your thoughts on the real future of MMO games. There has been a lot of speculation on games that would be tied to a true RL monetary currency such as gold. Gold has a fixed value around the world and there are now online services that allow you to purchase physical and virutal items using gold as a currency.

Do you forsee a time when an adult level MMO game could be based on such a standard? Where we would see the the legal exchange of virtual items using a hard currency in places like eBay. Where the user could actually make a living buying and selling items acquired in game by their characters? Perhaps a game where the in game items are extremely limited or take massive amounts of time online to acquire such that a sword you win from defeating a dragon could literally be worth thousands of dollars. Is it possible?

http://www.e-gold.com/

Balance

[quarmar]

Could you talk a bit about how you approach balancing the various archtypes and their specializations? CoH definitely seems to have the full spectrum of character types with good soloers, completely group oriented types, quick and easy types, late bloomers, etc... Was City of Villains kept in mind when the various archtypes and their power pools were created?

Q: What about the loners out there?

[filmguru]

Everybody knows there are as many heroes in comicdom who prefer to work alone (Punisher, Daredevil, and Batman, for example) as there are heroes in the Avengers or the JLA. But City of Heroes, being an MMOG, caters to an online community. After a month of solid play and getting my character up to level 12 (with some occasional help from others), I found myself unable to complete any new missions without assistance. If I continue to hang around in Kings Row, however, I don't get any experience for beating up weaker villains.

My question is this: will future expansions of CoH offer a "loner" track where one can choose to take only single-player missions? I'd like to continue playing in CoH's rich multi-player environment, but I don't want my growth experience in the game to rely on having to team-up to complete every mission. Am I alone in this thought?

Paragon City Backstory

[leyf]

As something of a comics continuity nerd, I really apreciate the backstory in City of Heroes which is available both in-game through the plaques & storyarcs and on the official website; it's very well thought out, with both homages to other comic universes and truly original content. I'm just curious, what comics and other sources would you list as influences in creating the City of Heroes universe? Particularly, I'm wondering too if George R.R. Martin's "Wildcard's" series played any part (thinking of the various super-powered street gangs). Thanks.

Re:When will City of Villans be rolled up with CoH

[Schnarl]

I thought CoV was an expansion, hence not a seperate subscription fee?

Why have there been successively worse nerfs?

[Anonymous Coward]

City of Heroes went through a long beta period where thousands of players logged tens of thousands of hours in a pretty novel environment. Every class was powerful, able to advance alone or in a group, and the game was very fun.

It stayed like this through release and the first month (the free month). Then - exactly one day after the free month expired, the nerfs started rolling in.

First was the "group nerf" - which put a swift end to the phenomena of "pickup groups" larger than 3-4 people by meddling with allowable levels and adding a 'difficulty ceiling' which ensured that even large groups filled with characters theoretically (based on stats) capable of destroying high-level mobs would not be able to. After this change, 8-man groups became extinct, especially ones with diverse levels. Several kludges have been applied since then to fix this break, but none have resurrected the "glory days" of the free month, before everything was caved in by a nerf bat.

Then, the other shoe dropped. The classes got nerfed, one by one. The most overpowered classes got put off the longest for nerfing, oddly enough, but eventually everyone got their hit.

Now that the heroes have been universally hamstrung, the next phase is brewing: to de facto nerf everyone again by increasing the resilience and difficulty of everything in the game world. Boy, that really sounds like fun.

My question is: are these nerfs truly borne of the desire to improve the game? As a long-time free-MUD player, the only time I ever experienced anything similar was during pwipes - which were almost never done intentionally because of the bad blood generated. I'm inclined to associate this behavior with pay-MUDs - the first place I experienced it was Everquest. Can you honestly say that nerfing, or game balancing if you prefer, isn't just a method of "slowing down" players from accessing content? These changes are always touted as what's best for the game, and while that may be true from a financial standpoint, from a fun standpoint I don't see how that's defensible. Please fill us in.

Price structure

[talaphid]

If you pay in advance, your monthly subscription is about $10.

Consider that they have to plan things like server bandwidth, number of customer support agents, and even how much to spend on the "free" updates based on how many customers they have - and at some point, they will be wrong. There will be fewer customers than they allow for. So they have to hedge their finances there.

Also, the game was in development for a long time. Their development staff didnt' subsist on air and good intentions for the years of pure negative spending. There are debts to pay!

Additionally, they have a publisher who again, fronted some risk (in this particular case, I believe they handle CSR, so that's one form of risk-spreading). However, they have... 6? coming out MMOs, and I really can't be bothered to look around, but let's guess they have, or have had, other products on market. Do you think all of them succeeded? Those failures have to be paid for somewhere.

Finally, they're not going to have 180,000 subscribers forever. For example, I cancelled after about six months of being their subscriber (they've gone from communicative with the community to a cutesy we-aren't-telling all the while ignoring feedback on hideously broken changes on the test server that go live and result in tremendous uproar and they take months to unpatch it...). Their next project may not do so well. Statistcally speaking, it won't. They, and their backers, will need some money to keep things going.

On top of that, everyone likes to actually pocket some money.

Mac Sound Cards

[ebooher]

Man, I hate it when people think they simply know everything there is to know about everything. You are not a Mac User. You make it obvious you are not a Mac User. You go so far as to say Mac Users are Dorks, yet you pretend to know everything there is to know about the Macintosh third party market.

... and you can't even put in your own damn sound card.

You, Sir, are most certainly wrong. You *can* install your own sound card, your own video card, your own any PCI based card in PCI based Macs. Which all Mac OS X compliant Macs are PCI based. PCI is an industry standard, and any PCI card from any manufacturer will go right into your Mac. Now the problem you will run into is drivers, but the card POSTs and tells the Mac what it is, in fact there are companies that even have Mac drivers if you can believe that! *GASPS!*

Here is a Mac compatible, PCI based third party sound card. http://www.portlandmusiccompany.com/phile.html/ Here is a blurb from the website about said sound card, because I know most are too lazy to actually read anything but blogs.

M Audio's Audiophile 2496 card is the latest addition to its highly successful Delta family of soundcards. The Audiophile 2496 is an all-in-one high fidelity soundcard solution for a wide variety of applications, ranging from multitrack recording to computer-based home theatre. Analog I/O is available on RCA jacks, utilizing the same professional 24-bit 96kHz conversion as the Delta 44 and Delta 66 cards. S/PDIF I/O and MIDI I/O provide connectivity to both digital devices and the world of MIDI. The Audiophile 2496 includes a powerful digital mixer/router, and control over SCMS (Serial Copy Management System). Delta cards support all computer platforms and major software programs. With software support, the Audiophile 2496 becomes the highest fidelity home theatre soundcard available today.

Minimum System Requirements for Mac:
G4, G3 or G3 accelerator
System 8.5.1 or above
128 MB RAM for 96kHz operation
96 MB RAM for 48kHz operation

If you are going to *pretend* to know everything, please at least do a little bit of research first.

My issues and suggestions

[destroy_all_monsters]

Hello Jack (and all) I was formerly a player of CoH and there were a few things that brought me down:

1. A lack of vehicles - I realize that CoH isn't meant to be GTA online, but in having non-powered punisher/batman etc. type characters it necessitates breaking that mold in order to get a movement power (and one dies a *lot* without one/them).

2. Chat - while having IRC type controls are kind of nice, the fact that you had a finite and relatively small amount of people you could add are a pain. This problem is particularly acute when you're a blaster that plays off hours making the need to collect as many healers as possible;let alone other folks that are your friends.

3. Supergroups - in many comics characters belong to more than one group.I think that either having a primary SG and affiliations with others would be a plus - or alternatively being given the opportunity to belong to an infinite number of SG's.

4. Cataclysms - Every now and then in the comics (at least the Big Two) there's a cataclysm that involves and indeed _requires_ the assistance of all heroes. There could be server wide and cross-server cataclysms that would up the ante excitement-wise for some time. Examples: Mageddon in JLA, varied Crises (DC), Cosmic Wars (see Thanos, Warlock etc - Marvel) etc. These shouldn't happen more than once a year but there should be some major fun involved in cross-server action.

5. Other - I really think that there ought to be more to do than beat downs and constantly looking to raise XP. It'd be nice if you could get xp by talking strategy or a form of crafting or whatnot. I don't have a clear idea of how this should look but playing for hours just doing beatdowns gets old after awhile (incidentally I bought this for my son who got sick of it a couple months before I did, due to the repetition). Making the game more of an item-hunt would suck too.Perhaps triggerable arcs that only apply to certain classes under certain circumstances would make the feel a bit more personal as well.

I wish you the best of luck and I hope that at the very least the chat and SG issues can be changed as I'd like to have reasons to return.

Tanks and Balance...

[M.Vorkosigan]

I played City of Heroes for about 6 months after launch. My chosen character, a tank, unfortunately left much to be desired when compared to the tanks -- or "bricks" -- of "real" comic books. What caused me to quit is that my "super strength" tank really didn't "feel" super strong. Why did you choose to go with the typical offense vs. defense balance system? Is there no way to innovate and create a new way to "balance" archetypes whereby tanks -- and all other archetypes -- could enjoy the legendary abilities of their comic book models? Perhaps by some system of strengths and weaknesses, or by further variety of bad-guy tactics? Is there no way to keep there from being a "best archetype" or "flavor of the month?" Assuming no such solution exists, is it a flaw of game design (by no means implying it is the designer's fault), or of the nature of gamers themselves?

Heroics in the City

[filmguru]

Have you considered incorporating more non-battle orientented heroics into City of Heroes? I envision heroes helping to rescue people from burning buildings, stopping the destruction of buildings and monuments following an earthquake, or even doing more simple heroics like foiling a bank robbery.

I think it would be an excellent way for low-level heroes to build experience. It would also allow for fun diversion from battle for experienced players.

Why are there so few missions?

[Snaller]

Many people constantly run out of missions, and have to slave away (or being forced to group) to get one or two levels before they can get new missions?

(Before some slashdotter asks 'why join a multiplayer game if you don't want to multiplay' for many reasons a lot of people are not there to multiplay but to be a hero - if they made a standalone version of the game people would probably have bought that instead)

A constant complaint: Too great exp requirement

[Snaller]

Face it, this should be a game for people WITH a life - its not Everquest ;)

They wanted to make more money

[Anonymous Coward]

and someone thought - "hey, if it takes them longer to anyway they'll have to pay more!"