City of Heroes Mission Creator Explained

Kotaku is running an article with details on an update to City of Heroes which will allow players to create their own missions and publish them for others to play. Quoting: "The Mission Architect for City of Heroes and City of Villains actually appears in game within buildings belonging to Architect Entertainment, a company that has developed a virtual training program for super-powered beings. Players will log in to a computer terminal in said buildings to gain access to the mission editor, where they can create anything from a quick mission that lasts a few minutes to a massive, five-chapter epic. Players write the dialogue, create the enemies, and map out the goals other players need to achieve to complete their mission. Once they've got it perfect, they can upload it to NCsoft's Arc Server, which delivers their content to all of the game servers. Once it's live, anyone can access the terminals in Architect Entertainment and run through the mission."

Comments

Kinda sad, though

[Moraelin]

It's kinda sad, though. The game had actual potential, so it was a bit painful to see it fuck up repeatedly. And while it's not half as bad nowadays than in Statesman's time, the game still has real problems.

The biggest of which IMHO is the screwed up difficulty curve, which makes it really hard to keep newbies there even if they try the game.

See, for example WoW starts easy and simple. You're awesomely powerful at level 1 compared to level 1 enemies. (The wolves in Northshire do 1hp per attack, so it would take a while to kill you even if you were trying to get killed.) There is no downtime. There isn't much running around. As the game progresses, actually you become weaker compared to the enemies. You need more tricks, more talents, purple equipment, etc, just to kill an enemy as easily as you were doing it at level 1. But at any rate, you can start having fun right here and now.

In COH it's exactly the other way around. In the beginning you have:

- buggerall attacks for a long time. (As a tanker or defender it's not uncommon to have one single weak attack until the mid-20's or so, and much twiddling your thumb while you wait for it to recharge.)

- you run out of endurance (think: mana) within a fight, and the "rest" button recharges once in a blue moon, so mostly you just get to sit around twiddling your thumbs for 3 f-ing minutes until it slowly recharges. And it gets even worse if you actually use your defenses, because those suck your endurance even faster.

- get to run to the other end of a zone and back all the time, and often through enemies which can kill you easily (running into level 6 enemies when running to a level 1 mission is not really great fun. And as that level means, it's more like running through level 10 enemies on WoW.)

- your accuracy sucks, so you'll have big streaks of missing the enemy

- you only need to take one wrong turn to wake up at the hospital

Etc.

And, you know, because that sucks already, let's add some enemies which make it worse. E.g., I know, if everyone is missing lots already, let's give them enemies which debuff to-hit. (The Circle Of Thorns ghosts, for example.) If everyone is already running out of endurance all the time, like they're The Amazing Asthmatic Man, let's give them enemies which actively drain endurance. (E.g., Clockworks or the Mu guys on Arachnos missions.) Etc. Oh, and just because nobody has any defense against knock-back or status effect yet, let's give them enemies which mez (tsoo) or that Kadabra Kill guy in a villain mission, which can perma-bounce you to death if he gets his Singularity out.

To get an idea how bad it can get, I was in a low-level task-force again recently where I was actually hitting the enemies 5% of the time. Measured, ffs. Whole chains of 20 to 50 swings at thin air, because some idiot designer thought it would be fun to fill the mission with accuracy-debuffers, at levels where nobody can have much accuracy to start with. That's the face that COH shows to new players.

What I'm getting at is that for the vast majority of classes, levels 1 to 20 are a frustrating grind. Unless you were the kind of masochistic guy who actually likes being kicked in the nuts hard and often. Or for some classes (e.g., controller) a grind to level 32. (Which in terms of time and effort invested is akin to having to grind to level 60 on WoW.) _Then_ you can start to actually enjoy the game.

Could they stop losing to WoW? Well, they could. The game keeps getting new people trying it all the time. I know I meet new newbies in it all the time. It would just need to give them a reason to stay there. But it just doesn't even try to be nice and gentle to them, so it loses them right back. Whoever expects to just enjoy the game right away, instead of gnashing teeth, counting xp and grinding to a level where it stops sucking, is gone by level 14.

Which incidentally is also the level cap in the downloadable demo. Yes, you've heard that right. They put the worst and most frustrating

Re:Kinda sad, though

[Moraelin]

Well, I understand your point, and the comparison has merit. Still, just to clear things up a bit:

1. Well, it's the same publisher, not the same developers. So, to be pedantic, it's not exactly the same people who made both.

2. The problem is that COH actually has 50 levels. So it doesn't even have the excuse of normal content vs endgame content. (By and large COH doesn't even have endgame content.) It's just almost half of the normal zones and content that one has to just gnash the teeth and grind through, just to get to a point where they don't have 50%+ downtime.

That is, if you knew to plan ahead. Which already isn't fun by itself, because you have more than half of your skills already accounted for just so you can stop sucking at level 20. There's not much flexibility or room for experimentation, just grinding ahead and checking checkmarks on a list of skills you must have by level 20.

But most newbies don't even know they need to do that. So if they made it to 20 without quitting, typically it's with a character which still sucks, and it just got suckier than ever. Now they're moving towards 75% downtime without those mandatory skills. If they hadn't quit in the teens, half of them will quit in the 20's, after discovering that the game let them plough ahead and get a non-viable character.

It just makes me wonder what the heck were they _thinking_ when they came up with that system.

Re:I can see it now....

[Tryle]

If you bothered to RTFA. Quote "6.How are you dealing with inappropriate content? a.We've worked very closely with our customer service department to develop systems for this. In the end, we implemented a number of different systems. We have language filters that check for bad words and won't let you publish them until you remove them. We're also allowing players to flag content for inappropriateness. We also track all users and flags for any potential vote griefing."

NCSoft is scoring big

[Bonker]

Player comments over at the official boards are pretty much ecstatic. NCSoft and their players are getting endless free content and every fanboy who's interested in 'rolling their own MMO' now has a way to write for a real MMO.

Oh, there are concerns about abuse and stupidity, but the general consensus is that Mission Architect is a very, very good thing. It's been designed from the ground up with player requests in mind and NCSoft has a pretty decent track record of pleasing players.

No one at NCSoft, nor their players expect CoH anything to be a 'WoW Killer', but City of Heroes is profitable and has an active community. This will only help expand that.

- A very lengthy podcast about the design and testing of Mission Architect

Basic features include:

- Ability to create NPC allies and enemies using CoH's costume creator and power selector
- Ability to link up to 25 mission objectives into one mission
- Ability to link up to 5 missions into one arc
- Ability to customize all dialogue, souvenirs, etc...
- User voting for 'Hall of Fame', Dev selection for 'Dev's Choice'.
- Vote tracking to reduce 'vote griefing'

I did say there was more than one issue :P

[Moraelin]

I think the biggest problem with a constantly changing game like CoH is that there is no set of documentation that is maintained and updated so that new and mid range players can understand what is going on. The closest thing is the paragon wiki and perhaps red tomax, but there is no directed tutorial that gets you into the nuts and bolts of CoH.

I did say there was more than one problem, and yes that's another one. The game violates the principle of least astonishment big time.

E.g., based on actually interacting with newbies, the ED is _the_ biggest and least obvious surprise, and it isn't documented anywhere except on the forums. I've had at least one sidekick o' mine get all upset and outright quit the game when he discovered that his 6-slots in Hasten early became 3 wasted slots once he got to SO's. There was absolutely nothing in the game to warn about it. Either you just knew about the soft cap from somewhere else, or you can shoot yourself in the foot big time with it.

The developers now has changed their stance and have published numbers and mechanics for the game, but you must go into the forums in order to find out how and what the game is like for each of the separate parts of the game. It also doesn't help when the game is still evolving in areas such PvP (wholesale revamp), economy (marketplace and loot, and reward merits) and general powers and powersets (new primaries and secondaries, and invention origin enhancements and set bonuses).

Glad that you mention that, because that's a thing that got even _me_ angry: the game does give you some info, but actually it flat out _lies_ to the player. Because the detailed info screens are not generated from the actual info used by those powers, and nobody updates them.

E.g., both the load-screen tips _and_ the detailed info for the powers, still tell new players that Brutes taunt with their attacks like the tanks. That hasn't been true in more than a year. Probably even two, IIRC. E.g., after the activation times for most of the Assault Rifle attacks were reduced to 0.9s, and the patch notes said so, last time I played my AR Blaster the in game info for those powers still said 1.0s activation time and calculated the wrong DPS by 11%!

I'm sorry, but that's just bloody sad.

The 'greybeards' of CoH tend not to have any problems with the issues you've described because they know what to take/not to take, how to avoid/slot/team to minimize the downsides to having low endurance/recovery and low accuracy and speed.

Just for the record, I've been there for more than 4 years, according to my veteran awards.

But that brings me to another thing: it's not us "greybeards" that the game needs to cater the most to. It's the newbies that are needed to grow, or even to replace the oldies that eventually get bored anyway and bugger off.

My perfect example are the veteran reward attacks. Everyone who's not a DPS class needed extra attacks at low levels, but they give them only to veterans of many years. Why? Just so they can continue to shed new players almost as fast as they get them?

If you have a defender or tank with a single attack, and you want to build a character who does have some kind of attack, use mids hero designer. It is third party standalone, and accurate enough where you can plan ahead to choose what powers you have and what the powers do.

Oh, I have Mid's Hero Designer. Newbies don't have it, though, and that's who COH really needs to start retaining more.

Knockback at any level can be problematic until you get to higher levels. Some ATs/powersets have a lot of -kb in specific powers, like tankers and scrappers. Use mids or the forums to find out which. Acrobatics is available at level 20 in the Leaping Pool if you don't have access to -kb in your powerset, although the current trend for a lot of people is to slot -kb procs in th

Re:Do these guys look for new ways to get sued?

[Bieeanda]

You can't sue for using similar themes and tropes, otherwise Lucasfilm would have steamrolled JK Rowling the moment Harry Potter hit the shelves.

Besides that, player created missions are written in plaintext. When you've got a database of inappropriate words, names and variations, a system in place for flagging both inappropriate and wildly popular content, and a human-readable output, catching stuff like House of W is pretty damn easy.

Re:I can see it now....

[Toonol]

There are a number of games that allow user created content, where the amateur content has significantly surpassed the professionally created content. Never Winter Nights is one example, as are the excellent mods for many first person shooters and RTSs.

It just depends on the flexibility of the tools, and the size and interest of the community. This has a large community built in, so I think it just depends on the functionality of the mission editor.

I imagine that 'recreations' of famous missions from comics will pop up a lot... I wonder if that will perk litigious-happy Marvel's interest?