Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Yup, my bad. Hey, they came out around the same time, I just mixed up the features.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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.
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.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
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.