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Infinite Crisis' Superhero Origins Story
An anonymous reader writes A new interview published this week looks at the creation of Infinite Crisis, one of the slew of Dota 2/League of Legends team multiplayer competitors currently under development. What makes this one stand out however is not only its use of DC Comics heroes like Batman and Wonder Woman, but the experience of the studio behind it, Turbine, in massively multiplayer online games and punishing abusive and toxic players, something League of Legends developer Riot has serious struggles with. Turbine was the studio behind the popular Asheron's Call, and is applying many of th same policing techniques it used in RPGs to the growing MOBA genre. Of course, they still have troubles with the inevitable: balancing Superman as a playable character. it's a challenge, Kerr admits, especially when you're having to nerf the Man of Steel as a result. "Yes, we redid Superman three times, because, and I know this is going to be a surprise, he was super overpowered," says Infinite Crisis creative director Cardell Kerr.
Are they really expecting to get a big piece of the pie that lol and dota2 are eating? I doubt that even blizzards moba will get a whole lot.
kal-el is powered by rays from the sun.
/vertise much?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
spoon man? is that you?
Won't touch their games with a 10ft pole.
He's just living in a world of cardboard. Always taking constant care not to break something, to break someone. Never allowing himself to lose control even for a moment, or someone could die. But you can take it, can't you, big man? What we have here is a rare opportunity for him to cut loose and show you just how powerful he really is.
One of the reasons I don't play Wow or LoL is the lack of fine tuned character control. This looks like just another version with different characters. Besides, I can already get a DC fix with DCU Online.
Soren Bowie of Cracked suggested another way to make Superman interesting: conflict about whom to save at any given moment. But I don't think it'd work in a game with multiple supers.
You could start at All The Tropes: "World of Cardboard Speech", which has the Justice League Unlimited quote at the top. And then waste a couple more hours clicking through all the links.
If they rely on the gimmick of keeping Supes away from sunlight, expect every encounter to resemble a Birdman episode from before he got admitted to the bar.
Lyte is actually counterproductive to improving the community in League of Legends.
Complain about your ban? Lyte will post a biased version of your chat logs to the forums, where you will be verbally abused by other players. He gets a little power trip, by playing forum troll. Complain? You'll be permanently banned.
Then that jackass gives talks at schools like MIT talking about how much he knows about running online communities.
Riot has a fun game, but their attempts at reigning in their community are the worst, most misguided, and childish possible.
Turbine is NOT known for handling abusive players. Players of DDO know them for not being able to fix exploits and doing nothing to the utterly rampant exploiters. About the only action ever taken is manually by the otherwise hamstrung GMs to people shouting racism in public channels, and then only if enough people complain.
Turbine's biggest property isn't mentioned in passing? Heh. Lord of the Rings Online is still going strong.
MOBAs are easier to make yes, but to attract a player base, you need to be special, have flair, and a little luck. I think Turbine should have just made a new MMORPG as they're skilled at to play it safe. Can you really make a MOBA attractive when there's only like a dozen or two DC characters to select from, and you still have to unlock a majority of them? To me, it seems like Turbine is attacking the MOBA scene like it knows what it is doing, but they probably don't. I'd like to be kindly surprised as I'm a Turbine fan, but their mainstay is good quality MMORPGS
With Blizzard doubling down on WOW and cancelling their MMORPG, there's no MMORPGS on the horizon that I know about that could be any good. I wish Turbine would make Asheron's Call 3 and not even consider it being a WOW killer. Just go through the motions, make a successful and big MMORPG with modern graphics, and you're going to get a player base as Turbine.
I bet Turbine would be a great place to work at, but none of their projects seem interesting right now. If they have deep pockets, they should be making more games than just a single game.
God spoke to me
Does there come a time in a nerd's life when s/he just doesn't care about yet another "origins" story?
I thought Turbine was done after LOTRO and DDO, Why must they touch another universe!!? :( Just leave me alone already!
Do today's gamers really care about being called 'fag' on the internet? I'm not much of a mmo player, but back in the quake days, the problem was dealt with by keeping the few who did whine to a minimum instead of pandering to them. They were unceremoniously booted from servers, laughed at and kicked off irc, and, otherwise, mocked and ignored. While some of them did persist, the community was healthy and stayed healthy for a long time because of that. Irrelevant complaints about 'mean words' and social justice politics were ignored. If you wanted respect, you had to get good at the game. Nothing else mattered. There were a few servers (out of thousands) that had silly rules meant to appease these people, and you know what? They rarely if ever had any players on them. A little pool shock every now and then keeps the water fresh and clear.
As far as other behavior goes, like griefing or outright cheating, it was difficult to do the former without sucking really bad anyway. There were a few specific maps and/modes that would lend themselves to it, but usually persistent griefers were booted after a minute or two. While there were some known cheaters that got away with it for a long time (even a whole clan of cheaters iirc), most were caught and booted/banned from servers.
The answer to 'abuse' in gaming is a chat toggle. Those who can't handle the main chat should turn it off, and the ones who whine anyway should get votekicked. These special snowflakes aren't worth pandering to. The better players are almost always more immune to the banter and trash talk anyway.
Since new accounts can be made in minutes, there's very little disincentive for toxic players. Voice is much harder to police than text.
S2's new MOBA, Strife, even goes to the extent of banning both (an exception is made for friends and party).
You're right that prominent voice/text toggles are a big part of the solution.
- Ultra-premium AKA ultra-high-priced franchise, DC superheroes, check!
- Massive committees in charge, check!
- Done by Turbine, part of Microsoft, check!
- YADC (Yet Another DOTA Clone) in an aging genre with a saturated market, check!
- DC's move belatedly into "action" MMORPGs, and Marvel's into "action" Diablo-clones both flopped miserably, check!
What could possibly go wrong?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The motto of people playing their MMOs has ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS been "exploit early, exploit often." That was true in 99/2000 with Asheron's Call just months out the gate, and it was(/is?) true two months ago as it got put out to pasture (one-time-fee-to-play, no new dev work).
Turbine will patch the hole but only once in a blue moon will they even consider taking action against paying customers, and usually even then only a slap on the wrist 1-3 day ban. The macros, duping hacks, speed altering programs (gear).
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
hes too powerful. He is "I can do every fucking thing man"... if he doesnt get to the damsel in time, he can just reverse time & try again.
The dude doesnt have a weakness.
"Oh, but what about kryponite?" Someone is going to chime in.
I dont believe he -does- have a weakness to kryptonite. If you watch you'll see that hes never weakened by kryptonite until the badguy opens up the briefcase & shows it to him.
I think the kryptonite thing is just an act.
the difference is that that quake experience youre talking about is a competitive game.
That is players killing players.
Indeed in multiplayer quake there wasnt anything to do -but- kill other players.
But MMO's strive for -cooperative- game play. Unlike quake deathmatch, the game doesnt begin & end with killing the other players. In an MMO you may not even have the option of killing other players. The goal is to get players to team up with eachother & fight cooperatively against a common enemy (usually AI, but maybe another group of players).
Sure, talking smack is fine for the random bullet-fest that was quake. But mmo's are reaching for a different type of gameplay.
Wasn't it about a year ago that Turbine's LOTRO had that awful Helms Deep release that just wrecked the game??? It was bad enough when they had a release that wasn't worth playing, which they did for several years. But at least that was end-game content that you didn't have to visit. Helms Deep wrecked all the lower-level early game content as well... Turbine ignored all the feedback during BETA. There was a mass exodus of players...
I had played LOTRO for 5 years. I bought expansions that I never used just to support them. Even bought a lifetime account. And HelmsDeep was so bad that I left!
They did crap like pulling out the skills you needed to survive the lower levels, and putting in a new top-level skill that could attack 8 mobs at once. Without supporting secondary AoE skills and with the cooldown, it was pretty much use it and die. It was like that for all the classes. Huge nerfs of skills across the board for every class. About 1/3 of the skills for each and every class were gone. Another 1/3 were partially reclaimable through their horrid one-dimensional trait system, often with "modifications" that made them worse then useless. It was just awful.
Now their nerfing Superman. Gee, I can't wait. On second thought, yes I can. This isn't worth my time to bother looking at it.
Whine whine... the people complaining this character or that character is overpowered. Quit whining that everything has to be NERFED just because you suck and you lost the battle. The Superman character comes with a sysop root account on the game server. So what? Deal with it and quit whining.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
wow, you played Lotro for 5 years and still sucked at it that badly?